The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction.
Gail L. Plummer
The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction
Department of English
Master of Arts
This thesis is an attempt to examine the reasons for a
noticeable trend in recent American short fiction, the interest
in probing the mind of a young child.
Discussion centers about
seven short stories which focus on the child and his viewpoint:
Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," Eudora Welty's "A Memory,"
Jean StaÎford' s "The
Flannery O'Connor's
Sho:r:r~
"Th(~
Lamb," J. D. Salinger' s "Teddy,"
River," Katherine Ann Porter's "The
Downward Path to Wisdom," and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret
Snow."
Part A studies the continuation of the traditional,
romantic belief in the purity and innate wisdom of the child;
it consists of chapters on the nostalgie memory, the child as
the seer of the truth of love and of religion, and the sentimp.ntal notion of his destruction by unrest within the family.
Part B
investigates the more analytical facets of the writers' interest
and is composed of a chapter on the writer as a child and another
on "the psychological short story."
e.
The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction
Gail L. Plummer
English
600b
August 5, 1968
.e
@)
Gail L. Plummer
1969
<X>NTENTS
.'
The Child in Twentieth Century Short Fiction
Preface
Part A.
In the Romantic Tradition
Chapter 1.
Page #
Introduction: The Tradition of Original
1
Innocence.
Chapter II.
The Nostalgie f'.1emory and the "Memory" Genre:
12
Truman Capote' s "A Christmas f'.1emory" and
Eudora welty's "A Memory."
Chapter III. The Child's capacity for Love:
Jean
26
Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb," Truman Capote's
"A Christmas Memory," and J. D. Salinger's
"Teddy,"
Chapter IV.
The Child's Ability to go Beyond Organized
41
Religion: Flannery O'Connor's "The River,"
Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews,"
and J. D. Salinger's "Teddy."
Chapter V.
Disorder and Early Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's
56
"The River," Jean Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb,"
and Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path
to Wisdom."
Part B.
The New Interest in the
Chapter VI.
•
Introduction:
P~ology
of the Child.
Freudianism and the Child
67
·'
Chapter VII
The Artist as a Child: Truman Capote's
74
fiA Christmas Memory," Conrad Aiken's
"A Silent Snow, Secret Snow," and
Eudora Welty's "A Memory."
Chapter VIII.The Psychological Short Story:
Ann
Katherine
89
porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom,"
Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," and
Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
Part C.
•
Conclusion.
104
i
.'
Preface
A few months ago 1 had reason to look very closely at an issue
of The New Yorker magazine and the two short stories which were published there.
One was about Australia, which is not surprising, for
that continent is in fashion at the moment.
The other, "Something
of a Miracle," by Ted Walker, was partially written from the point
of view of a boy of four years, and it is this story that was of
inter est to me.
To emphasize too much the fact of its inclusion
in this magazine would be to enter into the controversy over what
constitutes what has been termed "the New Yorker short story," a
discussion which would be out of place here.
But it is possible
to say:-that The New Yorker has been at the forefront in the publication of the short story during the last few decades and that it
often indicates trends both in style and content.
Many of our most
celebrated writers, such as Jean Stafford and J.D. Salinger, have
been published there; the majority of the tales printed by the
magazine are excellent.
short story
That The New Yorker has published such a
and that previously it has printed many which are
either written from a similar viewpoint or which concentrate to an
unusual degree upon a child is relevant for this thesis.
It is an
indication of what is, in fact, a noticeable trend in short fiction.
This thesis will attempt to examine the reasons for such an
overwhelming interest in probing the mind of a small child.
•
1 shall
examine a representative sample of short stories which cover a
variety of concerns ranging from a highly romantic belief in the
ii
•
purity and sensitivity or the child to attemptsto. investigate the
psychology or the young child.
aspects or the former interest.
Part A or my thesis will study
It consists or chapters on the
nostalgie memory, the child as the seer or true love and of an
intuitive belier in God, and the sentimental notion of the child's
destruction by unrest within the ramily.
Part B investigates the
more analytical racets or the writers' interest and is composed or
a chapter on the writer as a child and another on "the psychological short story."
l have tried to choose ror explication stories written during
the last thirty years (Conrad AÏken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"
or 1934 is the only exception).
Although l shall mention various
stories which raIl into the categories of perspective which l have
established, the discussion will center about a core or well-known
short stories, Truman capote's "A Christmas Me!!!c:i..y" (1956), Eudora
Welty's "A Memory" (1937), Jean
Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb" (1953),
J.D. Salinger's "Teddy" (1953), Flannery O'Connor's "The River"
(1955), Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom" (1944),
and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1934).
Although the
degree or objectivity with which the child is regarded varies on a
continuum between the very subjective view of Aiken's child and
Salinger's ractua1 recording or Teddy's words and actions, aIl or
these stories contain more than one or the major threads or interest
in the child's point of view •
•
1
•
Part A.
In the Romantic Tradition
Chapter 1.
Introduction:
The Tradition of Original Innocence
We are told that we are a child-oriented society, that our
interest in pop-art, pop-fashion, and pop-culture has its roots in
an almost compulsive concern with childhood and adolescence.
To a
certain extent this can be attributed to sociological factors.
According to 1965 census figures, four-ninths of the American population is under the age of twenty-five and this segment of the
population is increasing.
It should be no surprise that producers
are attentive to what is one of their largest markets for their
movies, records, clothes, and books.
But the fetish has entered
every facet of our culture.
Everyone now understands the adoles-
cent, or purports to do SOt
Children are not only seen and heard,
they are the topic of unlimited discussion.
Mary pOppins is a way
of lite.
Serious short fiction, however, is not aimed necessarily at
adolescent and seldom at children's consumption, so it is less easy
to understand why so many modern American and British story writers
have chosen to center their tales around children and, particularly,
to write from the child's point of view.
Perhaps because of the
growth of the sciences of psychology and sociology focus has been
placed upon the adolescent as one in whom the dramatic process of
•
initiation into society is or is not taking place.
For the short
fiction writer the resulting tensions between youthful ideals and
2
•
acceptance of an adult perspective provide perfect material for the
confrontation of illusion and reality important to fiction.
John
Updike, Salinger, Carson McCullers, and Hemingway have found in such
crises the intellectual action which catches our interest.
It is
these short stories written about adolescence, not for adolescents,
or, in any pejorative sense,
fiction.
~
them that l am te:r:ming "adolescent"
But the preoccupation with the child is less easily
explained.
Unless a confrontation with some hard fact of existence
is involved, as it often is, though";without the attendant problems
of puberty, the child has no such inherent dynamic potential for
the writer.
Why, then, is there this concentration of interest in
the child?
It is necessary first to note that the subject matter of such
fiction is far from new although it has only recently been incorporated into the short story forme
The traditional view of the child
is fundamentally romantic and is based upon a remote ideal of Eden.
In psychological, rather than symbolic terms, the connection is
between the Eden-child and our basic instincts and desires, to the
"given" in man before a cultural surface has been added.
Closeness...-
to God, simplicity, an innocence of the concept of sin, chastity,
helplessness, a sympathy for other human beings and for animaIs, and
relative humility:
these are some of the attributes commonly
ascribed to fictional portrayals of the child, of Adam, and of the
pure heart of man.
•
Characteristics of sensuality and egoism which
had, by the Calvinists, been construed as "original guilt" have
become acceptable in the romantic tradition as it has been established
3
•
during the past two hundred years.
Our vision of the child has
changed somewhat since the time of Rousseau, but the "original
innocence" of childhood has remained part of the concept.
Although
the scientific analysis of the child's consciousness in the interests of psychology has added specters of complexity and sexuality,
these have been subsumed in the "innocence" as our definition of
the term has broadened and secularized.
To the writer concerned
with present-day existence, the child remains one of the last
natural strongholds of cultural primitivisme
The Cult of Childhood, by George Boas l , is helpful in placing
particular interest in the child in its historical perspective.
An anthropological, rather than a literary, study, it briefly traces
the view of the child since primitive times as found in many different cultural records.
Boas sees the child as part of a traditional
:fascination with the so-called "innocent," often a mere projection
of desires for escape in a complex society.
An intuitive wisdom, a
keen appreciation of beauty, and an apprehension of moral values,
these are what Boas considers the unchanging contribution o:f the
image o:f the child for our culture.
An interest in youth is closely
allied to the preoccupation with indians, the insane, and rural folk.
According to these standards, today's hippies and yippies are as
consciously attempting to return to a natural state as was Marie
Antoinette when she played milkmaid in the palace gardens.
In
writing o:f the child the modern author is also searching, through
•
this less complicated being, for the basic forces which can have
IGeorge Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London, 1966).
4
•
universal truth.
It is customary to believe that romantic focus on the child
began with Rousseau's comprehension of the child's worth "in him•
self and not as a diminutive adult,"
2
but actually the tradition
reaches far back in Christian history with the &mulation of the
Christ-child.
Although it was always tempered with the recogni-
tion of a need to socialize and educate the child, certain char acteristics of clear sight, honesty, and purity were established, so -'
that, by 1628, John BarIe could consider the child a copy of Adam,
"happy, because he knows no evil nor hath made means by sin to be
acquainted with misery.,,3
from GOd.,,4
"The older he grows, he is a st air lower
This concern is a polarity of the concept of perfection
which has always been stressed in opposition to more urbane figures
such as Castiglione's "the Courtier."
In terms of British literary
tradition the previous two hundred years have focused upon the child
to an exceptional degree.
Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, James M.
Barrie, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas have aIl made use of his freshness of perspective and naturalresponses.
The tradition has found
its student in Peter Coveney, whose work, The Image of Childhood;
The Individual and Society:
~
a Study of the Theme in English Litera-
has been of the greatest help to me in defining schools of
interest.
•
2peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, revised edition
(Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 6.
3
Boas, p. 42.
4
Boas, p. 43 •
/
5
•
In the American literary tradition the child plays an even
larger role.
Since l am dealing with American short stories only,
it is interesting to summarize the major American aspects of such
concerne
Emerson's equation of a "healthy attitude of human
nature" and "The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner," who
never burden themselves "about cOI.sequences, about interests" and
who give "an independent, genuine verdict,"S sets the stage for an
idealization of boyish frankness which continues through this century.
"A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse,,6
perhaps summarizes this more active, brash, and open conception
of boyhood.
The literary
tradition is of course opposed by
such
pieces as Hawthorne' s "The Gentle Boy" (1832), but this milder view
is overwhelmed by the more enduring figures of Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer.
What may resemble lawlessness and lack of breeding are
actually a developed romanticism.
Huck's vision is the true one
which cuts through society's veneer; the moral standards he evolves
are superior to those of his eIders.
Bad Little Boy" (who makes very
Twain's "The story
of the
good) was rejected by william
Dean Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly for this very
reason, although its hero is simply performing his function, established by Dickens, as social cri tic.
The Innocent
E~e,
Albert stone, who has, in
examined Twain particularly in relation to his
writings on boyhood, notes the "double vision" of Twain's child;
•
5Ralph WaldoEmerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Stephen E. Whicher (Boston, 1957), p. 149 •
6
Emerson, p. 149.
6
•
like the adolescent in today's fiction he is continually aware of
his former purity and future involvement in society.7
Twain's fiction, like that Louisa May Alcott, combines the
"two traditions of children as audience" and "children as sUbjects,,,8
a1though stone quotes a passage from Twain's notebook, "1 write
for grown-ups who have ~ boys.,,9 Other American writers did not
concern themselves with the latter convention, for, as in England,
children's literature was becoming accepted.
per~.odica1s
There were children's
such as Youth's Keepsake Magazine.
The dime "Beadle
and Adam" nove1s began to be pub1ished in 1860, and provided adventurous and, at least at first, moral stories for young readers.
The boy-child's specific connection to his generic prototype,
Adam, is an apt subject for American 1iterature, for the American
myth of the Promised Land, the New Eden, forces attention on its
first inhabitant.
Henry Nash Smith's virgin.,Land and R. W. B. Lewis'
DO
The American Adam treat the nationis literature in these terms.
Lewis considers that there has been probab1y but one true Adamic
hero "unambiguous1y treated" in our literature, Cooper's Natty
.
.
t 0 reappear. 1 0
.
Bumpo, b ut h e notes t h at t h e f 19ure
cont 1nues
. H1S
statement that "there has been a kind of resistance in America to
the painful process of growin9, something mirrored and perhaps
7Albert stone, The Innocent Eve: Childhood in Mark Twain's
Imagination (New Haven, 1961), p. 91.
8
Stone, p. 278.
9 Stone, p. 58.
•
10
.
.
.
R. W. B. Lew1s, The Amer1can Adam (Ch1cago, 1955), p. 91 •
7
•
buttressed by our writers, expressing belief in repeated efforts
to revert to a lost childhood and a vanished Eden"ll has been
supported by other critics.
Ihab Hassan sees the American dream
in probably its most broad interpretation, as one which each
person must discover for himself, by himself, "a persistent escape
toward freedom which the American conscience perpetually qualifies.,,12
Leslie Fiedler, always ready to carry any hypothesis to its illogically logical extreme, finds this evidence of the nation's "regressiveness,,,13 "an unintended symbolic confession of the inadequacy
we sense but cannot remedy.,,14
1 think it is possible to say that the child, in
te~ms
of the
American myth, is another instance of the national des ire to be
complete, to be final, by the method of going to extremes.
Pro-
bably because of this nnew world" attempt now three centuries old,
pride in the
character.
be~t
and giggest is an integral part of the American
To go forward to a Promised Land is partly a regressive
escape toward an Eden of perfected stasis, of perpetuaI innocence
and summer, opposing the flow of actual life.
ultimately, then, it
is an escape to a kind of death, and in extreme desires for childhood there is a type of death-wish.
At the same time, examining
lite in its least complex and elemental state in the child is
necessarily an affirmation of life, another attempt to discover just
Il Lewis, p. 129.
•
12 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: studies in the Contemporary
American Novel (Princeton, N. J., 1961), p. 37
13 Leslie Fiedler, An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and
Politics (Boston, 19~) p. 144.
14 Fiedler, p. 209~1
8
•
what "man" is.
Although this "womb-tomb" reconciliation-of-opposites
concept commonly leads to
li~erary
dead-ends, as 1 shall point out
later in this thesis in relation to specifie works, it does partly
explain the compulsive interest in the child which has haunted our
literature in its context as one phase of the Promised Land mythe
It is not strange that this myth should be used and annihilated
by William Faulkner.
As Sanctuary deliberately destroys the Gothic-
novel tradition in aIl but its essence of horror,
50
"The Bear"
depicts the death of the American wilderness but leaves its architypaI counterpart, a perceptive, instinctually alert boy.
Ike has
inherited the burden of the land:
It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and
intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness • • •
through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism
indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a phantom,
epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life. • • -- the old
bear, sOlitary, indomitable, and alone • • • • 15
Only Ike and the primitive figure Sam know instinctively what he
must do to see the bear.
Ike even knows that he cannot fight the
bear's death, that "there was a fatality in it • • • • It was like
the last act on a set stage.
something,,,16
It was the beginning of the end of
Most of Faulkner's children, such as "Sart y" of
"Barn Burning," have this wisdom of youth and attachment to nature.
Others, such as Quentin of "That Evening
sun,"
report occurrences
in a naturalistic manner and thus provide the passive, uncritical
medium through which Faulkner likes to pass his events.
•
15 \oJ'i1liam Faulkner, "The Bear," The Portable Faulkner,
ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1954), p. 229 •
16 Faulkner, "The Bear," p. 261.
9
•
Hemingway emphasizes the boy's association with nature less
than his place in the organic view of growth.
Nick Adams matures
through various encounters and reconciliations with his environment
to become the "Hemingway hero" -- a hard, urbane surface is constructed which hides a sensitive heart.
Life holds a pattern of
disillusionment for the young as romantic ideals fail to be
proven; the results are pain and loss, yet there is a gain of a
wiser stance in regard to reality.
"The Capitol of the World"
illustrates the disparity between the real and the imagined.
The two threads of the story, the drab half-lives of the boarders
at the Pension Luarca and the bull-fight dreams of Paco, come into
focus when Paco is accidently stabbed to death by "the horn of a
bull" which is in actuality a knife tied to a chair:
The boy Paco had never known. • • what aIl these people
would be doing on the next day and on other days to come.
He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended.
He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish
phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his
life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete
an act of contrition. 17
The story could be overly sentimental: the poignance and perfection
of an innocent child's death is an old convention.
But
Heming~ay's
understated prose here conveys something else -- regret at the
child's loss of the chance to be completed by coming to terms
with his world in some way.
•
17 Ernest Hemingway, "The Capitol of the World," The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, (New York, 1938) p. 149 •
10
.'
The children of the short stories l am analyzing here, with
the exception of Capote's Buddy, are freed from the pastoral
setting, but they have the same instinctive perception of the
truth and are affected by t he cumulative nature of their experiences.
It is these specifie aspects of the child which have been
carried over into the modern image of youth from the previous
American authors rather than the free rough-and-tumble boyhood.
AlI these children are dreamier, quieter, and less adventurous
than their American predecessors such as Huck Finn.
are younger.
And they
It is as though, in their search for the true
Adamic child, our authors are turning to the younger, purer
child, while at the same time freeing themselves from the specifically "American" tradition of bpyhood.
The fact that these authors are also allying the child with
other representatives of those outside our system of acquired
culture is a similar telling signe
One short story considered
here, Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," uses a woman who is
both elderly
and feeble-minded and, therefore, a perfect sympa-
thetic companion for a child of seven.
still a child" are the highest
prai~e
Capote's words "She is
he can give to someone who
has the native empathy and sensitivity of Buddy' s
'~f:dend."
Faulkner's "Benjy" and Eudora Welty's "Clytie" are similar retarded
people whose comprehensive vision is seen as the center for the
values of warmth and love in their respective fictional works •
•
Il
•
Jean stafford embodies a similar sentiment in her story "Children
Are Bored on Sunday," where only two older despairing people,
because of their previous misfortunes, can play together with aIl
the innocence of children.
Her story frees the "child" from any
age-group or intelligence-group, stipulating only that he be outside of and tired of the existing norms of the society in which
he moves.
In her short story we see deÏined the most fundamental
"child," the person who is for some reason, at any moment in time,
on the other side of the barrier which separates the civilized
and rational from the natural and emotional.
The truth and worth
of such a personts perspective is usually the concern of the
writer who is attempting to portray the world of the very young
child •
.
'
12
•
Chapter II.
The Nostalgie Memory and the "Memory" Genre:
Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and
Eudora Welty's "A Memory."
Probably the most numerous short stories written rrom a
child's point or view are the nostalgie personal memories.
Some
or these, such as Eudora Welty's "A Memory" and Lincoln Stephen's
"A Miserable Merry Christmas," touch upon events which the authors
consider signiricant, but others, such as Truman Capote's "A
Christmas Memory" and Mark Twain's personal reminiscences, are
designed to recall "the good old days."
As Huck Finn's raft exis-
tence can be interpreted as a memory or lire berore the Civil War,
the Eden-child boyhood or twentieth-century authors orten rel ives
a carerr'ee pastoral youth ber ore "the war" or whatever milestone
the author has taken as an emblem or his world's particular "raIl."
His stories portray lire berore the destructive mechanical age, or,
more exactly, berore his awareness or such an age.
These are part
or the eentury's "cult or nostalgia" ror a youth spent in the
country berore the typical move to the city or suburbs, for the
"rural rolk" or Norman Rockwell's paintings, Will Rogers' jokes,
and Yankee magazine.
Anthologies or such reminiscences such as
C. B. Davis' The Eyes or Boyhood and Whit Burnett's Time to Be
Young collect these stories, while some authors (William Saroyon
.'
and Walter de la Mare, ror example) make this time or lire the
topic ror volumes or short stories.
Graham Greene goes so rar as
13
•
to state that the child is the only true reader; here are lines
Ïrom his preÏace to his collection oÎ critical essays on childhood reading, The Lost Childhood:
Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep
inÏluence on our lives. In later liÏe we admire, we are entertained, we modiÏy some views we already hold, but we are more
like1y to Ïind in books merely a conÏirmation oÏ what is in
our minds already • • • • OÏ course l should be interested to
hear that a new novel by Mr. E. M. Forster was going to appear
this spring, but l could never compare that mild expectation
oÏ civilized p1easure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled
glee l Ïelt when l Ïound • • • a novel by Rider Haggard • • • • 1
In an attempt to approximate a childlike point oÏ view some
authors have written in a sort oÏ child's dialect: Henry A.
Shute's "Sequil -- Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First"
is a diary with appropriate misspellings and lack oÏ punctuation;
Ring Lardner presents in "The Young Immigrunts" a manuscript
ostensibly typed by a child oÏ Ïour with similar quaint grammar
and one pathetic pun, the "rye smile" oÏ a drunken Ïather.
Stories such as these Ïorm the "entering wedge" Ïor the child's
admission into short Ïiction.
a. Truman Capote's liA Christmas Memory"
Van Wyck Brooks' analysis oÏ Mark Twain's Ïixation with his
youth, one which applies to the "cult oÏ chi1dhood" writer in
general, is pertinent in a consideration oÏ Truman capote's
"A Christmas Memory":
1
Graham Green, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays
(London, 1951), p. 13.
14
•
It is generally understood. • • that when people in middle age
occupy themselves with their childhood it is because some central instinct. • • has been blocked by either internaI or
external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until
it reaches a period in their memory when l~fe still seemed
to them open and fluid with possibilities.
Although this statement is generally evaluative of the man and not
of his works, each of which should be separately considered, it is
weIl to keep it in mind in an analysis of this story.3
Capote's early work was concerned with his youth.
Much of
The sensibility
of the central character of Other Voices, Other Rooms resembles
that of Colin in The Grass Harp and the "1" of this story.
The
experience of being raised by his two elderly cousins, his "friend
Dolly Talbo" and her sister Verena, who is not an "easy woman" (1
use their Harp names), apparently had enough impact to haunt Capote
and supply him with fictional material.
Like the grass harp he
must be "always telling a story," for the harp "knows .aU the
stories of aIl the people on the hill, of aIl the people who ever
lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours too."
4
Ihab Hassan finds Capote a narcissitic writer, placing his
interest in childhood in a lost of "The prevalence of dreams,
• • • the negative concept of adolescent initiation, the concern
with self-discovery, the emphasis on homoeroticism, and the general
2
•
Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York,
1920), p. 175.
3 Truman Capote, nA Christmas Memory," Breakfast at Tiffany's:
A Short Novel and Three Short·Stories (Toronto, 1966). References
will be to this edition. The story was originally published in
Mademoiselle, 44 (December, 1956), 70-71+.
4
Truman Capote, The Grass Harp (New York, 1951), p. 4 •
15
•
stasis oÏ /iiis7 mythic world,,5 which aÏÏirm this tendency.
"A
Christmas Memory" barely escapes this charge oÏ excessive selÏindulgence.
A Series oÏ vignettes coming to a somewhat Ïorced
philosophical conclusion with "his friend's" view of God, its
chief reliance is upon a preciousness of child;1ike expression
and the evocative folksy setting.
go sour at any moment.
It is a tearjerker and can
In accordance with capote's theory of
literature, that Itstyle is the mirror of an artist's sensibility
-- more so than the content oÏ his work,,,6 careful attention is
given to each detail, particularly as it concerns the narrative
viewpoint.
Here there is a discrepancy.
Ostensibly the story
is told by an older person reminiscing about the Christmas when
he was seven, yet the narrator is the child throughout most of
the tale, verbs are in the present tense, and there is a clear
attempt at imitation of a child's diction and expression.
There
are, for example, little interjected exclamations, "and oh, so
much flour, • • • spices, flavoringsj why, weIll need a pony to
pull the buggy home." (p. 116) Some of these miss the speech of
a seven-year-old, such as "Oh, the carnage of August: the flies
that flew to heaven!" (p. 118)
Other such techniques are lists
and parentheses:
•
5 Hassan, p. 235.
6 Truman Capote. These words are credited to Capote but no
source is given in the Ïollowing article: Paul Levine, "Truman
Capote: The Revelation of the Broken Image," The Virginia
Quarterly· Review, XXXIV (1958), 601 •
16
•
Here are a few things she has done, does do: Killed with a hoe
the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen
rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try
it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost stories (we
both believe in ghosts) 50 tingling they chilI you in JUly,
talk to herself, • • • (p. 117)
EIders are "Those who Know Best."
There are question, abrupt
phrases, and combinat ions of diary and stage directions such
as "Enter: two relatives.tVery angry."
But of course projection of the "memory" into a child's
language is not complete; the lyric images of the conventional
pastoral setting betray an older and more practised narrator:
Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as
an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the
horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. • • • A mile
more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our
clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus
and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an
ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not aIl the birds have
flown south. Always the path unwinds through lemony sun
pools and pitch vine tunnels. (p. 122)
The ending, of course, explains the double viewpoint, one
which has been evident, but, I think, not strained.
But that the
story occasionally lapses into preciousness is a harder charge to
answer.
The woman "friend" who has no other name, and who resem-
bles the imaginary friend children invent for their playmates in
her resourcefulness and "alter-ego" relationship to Buddy; the
conventional picture of the two of them waking relatives and
opening presents; their companion Queenie, who does everything
a dog is supposed to do, including burying a bone: aIl are a bit
•
too poignant, too familiar, too sentimental.
In trying to imitate
childish expression, "home-town" phrasing and Dylan Thomas-like
17
.'
lyricism, Capote has placed a great burden on his prose style.
Given only a simple story and sentimental atmosphere, it cannot
save the work from coming painfully close to the nostalgie tales
of lesser writers.
As regards the child (and those who, like "the friend," are
still children), the story is similar to those of the James M.
Barrie school.
The specifie "cult of the child" associated with
his name, which carried the interest in the child established by
the Pre-Romantics to an extreme, surrounded the child with an
aura of quaint nostalgia.
The worldof childhood became separated
from adulthood; unlike the youth which Wordsworth recounts in
The Prelude, its events bear no
adult.
relationship to a later, older
The child became a repository for desires for escape to
an idyllic, yet adventurous paradise such as those of Lewis
Carroll and James M. Barrie.
Barrie's Peter Pan, for example,
presents a "frame" of a relatively prosaic childhood which contrasts to the vivid fairyland of indians and pirates.
The tale
had great appeal, "hundreds and thousands of /adults reportedli7
. . • fell
right into his open trap • • • •
away from it.
They couldn't get
And they, too, suddenly hated being grown up.,,7
In nA Christmas Memory," as in the "cult of childhood," the child
is not only irrevocably separated from the adult world, his
.
7 Cited by Coveney, p. 250. The quotation is presumably from
The Story of J.M.B. (London, 1941) by Denis Mackail which is
mentioned in Coveney's bibliography, but page numbers are not given •
'
18
•
sensibility is seen as the truest, and his coming of age a tragedy.
Older relatives simply can do no good -- they anticipate no
Christmas, exercise their authority foolishly, and impose a strict
Christianity.
Even their gifts are "skin-flint."
"Friends" worthy
of their Christmas fruitcakes are those who, on short acquaintance,
exhibit only
childlike characteristics, such as the willingness to
wave from a bus every àay, or the extreme kindness which the
narrator connects chiefly to childhood alone.
who at the end
0;[
The author himself,
the tale is now a "grown-up" in a boarding school
or college, has also lost the spontaneity and freedom of his youth,
as the last image of "rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites
hurrying toward heaven""indicates.
Capote comes close to stating
the very dangerous, very romantic equation of everything good with
childhood and everything bad with adulthood.
The negative view of
"grown-upl is barely qualified by Mr. Haha Jones and those few
people who receive fruitcakes.
b.
Eudora Welty's "A
Mem~ry."
Eudora Welty's "A Memory" is less saccharine and cannot
actually be placed in the same category as the usual rambling
personal reminiscence.
pathos.
It aspires to fiction rather than mere
The narrator is clearly older; there is no distracting
attempt at a child's phrasing.
Because the viewpoint is well-
established, the events recorded can be put in perspective and
••
commented upon by
the narrator.
This is a story with action,
not a plot sequence of large events, but a recognition, a reaching
19
.'
of a conclusion.
The question of the autobiographical nature of "A Memory" is
not important for my purposes.
Its problematic origin places
th~
story in the genre of perhaps true, perhaps fictional tales which
examine a childhood incident not only as if it were fact but as
though it has impact on the fictional older character.
Naturalis-
tic reporting and depiction of local color are obviously secondary.
The story takes it place with Salinger's "The Laughing Man,"
Graham Greene's "The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard," and Robert
Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter."
"A Memory," as both Alfred Appel (the author of' the only booklength treatment of Eudora Welty's work, A Season of Dreams) and
Robert Penn Warren have pointed out, is a key story in the exposition of Eudora Welty's fictional philosophy, particularly as it
relates to other short stories of the volume in which it was first
cOllected, A curtain of Green aBè
O*Ae~ ê~e~ies
(1941).
The child
of this short story is able to be a part of both worlds, "the protection of Lher7 dream" and the ugly beach scene of reality.
need not choose.
She
For the adults of the rest of the volume, Mrs.
Larkin of "A Curtain of Green" and Clytie of the story of that
name, some decision or action is necessary.
Appel theorizes that
this view of the child is central to Miss Welty's fiction.
Its
establishment in "A Memory" makes it possible for him to continue:
"But what of the adult?
•
In its encounter with experience, how
20
•
does the self' preserve its innocence, or identity, or sanity?"a
There is evidence that "A Memory" is specif'ica11y designed
to state this concept.
Bef'ore the qualif'ication of' reality by
the arrivaI of' the bathers, the beach scene and the enveloping
dream are closely
weighted in desirability; there is no tension.
The "1" of' the story is consistently candid in describing her
sensations and their implications, nevertheless a statement such
as the f'ollowing stands out as a deliberate1y placed indication
of' the normal balance of' the narrator's "dual lif'e, as observer
and dreamer":
"1 still wou1d not care to say which was more
rea1 -- the dream l cou1d make b10ssom at will, or the sight of'
the bathers.
l am presenting them, you see, on1y as simu1taneous.,,9
The romantic dream is a1most imagined:
"it was possible
during that entire year for me to think end1essly on this minute
and brief' encounter which we endured on the stairs, until it would
swe1l with a sudden and overwhelming beauty, like a rose f'orced
into premature b100m f'or a great occasion." (p. 145)
But the
bathers are real -- "loud, squirming, ill-assorted people."
f'at woman in particular is vulgar.
The
Her action of' dumping out sand
caught inside her bathing suit is the epitome of' the
bather~s~
collective inhumanity:
•
a Alf'red Appel Jr., A Season of' Dreams: The Fiction of'
Eudora 'VJelty (Baton Rouge, 1965), p. 8.
9 Eudora Welty, "A Memory," A curtain of' Green (Garden City,
New York, 1941), pp. 146-147. Subsequent ref'erences will be to
this edition. "A Memory" was originally pub1ished in The
Southern Review, III (1937), 317-322 •
21
•
She bent over and in a condescending way pulled down the rront or
her bathing suit, turning it outward, so that the lumps or mashed
and rolded sand came emptying out. l relt a peak or horror, as
though her breasts themselves had turned to sand, as though they
were or no importance at aIl and she did not care. (pp. 150-151)
The description or ::the human in nonhuman terms"lO and the "concentrationon dissociated parts or the bOdy"ll combine to make this
vision a strangely abhorrent one.
In terms of polarity, the story
provides a microcosm of conflicting rorces which Robert Penn Warren
is justiried in extending to aIl experience, contrasts or "the idea
and nature; innocence and experience; • • • love and knowledge.,,12
In the race or a repugnant actuality the narrator consciously
clings to her dream, "the shudder or /ber/ wish shaking the darkness like leaves where Lshe7 had closed /her7 eyes," but it will
not, ror a time, return.
She can only open and shut her eyes,
juxtaposing the garish vision or the bathers and the "sweetness"
and "happiness" which accompanied her rantasy.
The dream-lire
perseveres, ror t'he bathers leave, but it is opposed by some conception or a necessary compromise with reality.
The narrator reels
"pit Y suddenly overtake" her as she sees the remaining "small worn
white pavilion" or her dream.
But the last paragraph indicates
that the incident only supplements her love.
She thinks or the
ruture (not, as al ways berore, the past) when she will see "the
boy /She7 loved walking into the classroom, when /she7 would
.'
10 Appel, p. 101.
Il Appel, p. 100.
12
Robert Penn Warren, se1ected Essays (New York, 1951), p. 163.
22
•
watch him with this hour on the beach accompanying /her7 recovered
dream and add to /her/ love." (p. lSl)
For the child the vision does not
end~
the dream or the
ability to dream; rather, it is simply incorporated into her
persistent romanticism.
It serves to heighten the contrast between
the boy she loves, "speechless and innocent," "solitary and unp:r.otected," as she insists in seeing him, and other people with whom
she comes in contact.
Like Buddy and his "friend" of "A Christmas
Memory" she finds it easiest to love those she sees least, whose
inevitable vulgarity do es not jar her from her conception of the
ideal.
As a child, she is allowed to continue in her fantasy.
And she is also able to live this "dual life, of observer
and dreamer" (the words, Miss welty's, are from the story).
The
narrator's conception of observation, which l will look at more
closely in a later chapter, is far from passive, yet to dream and
to observe is not to participate in any physical way in the real
world.
The implication is that such active involvement is not
required of the child, that this age is reserved for thought and
the forming of concepts.
This fact makes the milestone a more
subtle and indefinite one that those commonly reached in what l
am terming "adolescent" fiction •
•
23
•
c.
Summary.
Edgar Allen Poe, in his criticism of Hawthorne's Twice-Told
Tales, has established what have become "classic" directives for
the short story writer.
He states that the short fiction work
should strive for the creation of "a certain single effect.,,13
Wben the author has decided upon this "he then combines such
events, and discusses then in such tone as may best serve him
in·establishing the preconceived effect.,,14
Stories such as
"A Christmas Memory" violate the ground rules of short fiction
by choosing incident before outcome.
Their "single effect,"
which may still be produced, arises Dot from a combination of
events and considered style, but from the nostalgie potential
in the occurrences themselves.
Capote begins with a memory of Christmas fruitcakes, and his
elaborate prose does not hide this facto
Yet it is not hard to
see .hy·such experiments are confined chiefly to short fiction.
Any work in which style is emphasized over narrative action and
theme must of necessity be short; essentially formless, often
one or two simple vignettes, the
t~pical
recollection tends to
be boring if extended or read in any quantity.
Such tales are
often written in subjective unbroken monologue form, one which
tends to clog if overused.
•
13 Edgar Allen Poe, The Selected writings of Edgar Allen Poe,
edited with an introduction and notes by Edward H. Davidson
(Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 448.
14 Poe, p. 448 •
24
•
Perhaps the most striking characteristic of this group of
short stories is their autobiographical nature, which l have
mentioned in connection with the Capote short story; it is perhaps the only group with which l am concerned here which must
defend itself against Leslie Fiedler's charge of a "regressiveness" of American fiction in its "compulsive veneration of
youth."
The tradition has, of course, its European counterpart
in Dylan Thomas.
"A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Holiday
Memory" from his Quite Barly One Morning volume are typical lyric
pieces which do perhaps approximate memories of a day -- detailed,
yet impressionistic.
His words "The memories of childhood have
no order, and no end,,15
best explain the curious, almost inbred
fascination which youth holds for these writers.
Danger arises, of course, when nostalgie sentiment takes
precedence over concerns of style and form, when the author's
self-indulgence excludes consideration of his reader.
In the
second group of "memory" stories represented by Welty's "A Memory"
this seldom happens.
Closely knit, with evident theme and "single
effect," they conform more closely to Poe's ideals of short fiction writing than the usual digressive recollection.
Miss \'lelty's tale be a memory?
Why must
l suggest that it is the presence
of an older narrator that intrigues the many writers who have
chosen to write stories in this forme
•
This hypothetical reminis-
15 Dylan Thomas, "Reminiscences of Childhood," Quite Barly One
Morning (New York, 1954), p. Il •
25
.-
cing adult extends the story by implying continuity between the
time oÎ the related incident and the time oÎ the writing oÎ the
short story.
One such "memory," Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's
Tale," implies the nature oÎ this older person in its title,
but others, suchas Miss Welty's tale, leave his identity more
shadowy.
We can perhaps guess at the personality oÎ a person
who would write in such a style, choosing such an incident, but
nothing more.
Such stories Îorm the basis Îor what l term
"the psychological short story,"
The narrator such as that oÎ
liA Memory" views the events Îrom a wiser and sader stance outside the world oÎ the story.
And, in this reliving oÎ his
early traumas or pleasuret he dramatizes them, deepening the
contrast between Îorces such as the love-dream and the reality
oÎ
Miss Welty's story.
Even the least aesthetic occurrences
take on a latent cuteness or some hidden prophetie meaning which
the reminiscing adult can recognize and stress •
•
26
•
Chapter III.
The Child's Capacity for Love:
Jean
Stafford' 5 "The Shorn Lamb," Truman capote' s
"A Christmas Memory," and J.D. Salinger's "Teddy."
The definition of "love" has been the concern of many eras,
but perhaps at no time has it received the attention of
popular fiction as in our century.
50
much
Erich Fromm considers the
"art" of loving, the psychologist investigates the ability to love,
the mystic values the attainment of love.
While what has become
solidified into a sentimental "love-at-first-sight" and "happilyever-after" heterosexual love has been the topic for the mass of
woman's magazine literature, the short story, as weIl as other
serious fiction, has been defining the term in a more comprehensive
fashion.
In some works the equation of God and love has taken on
a meaning
50
vast that this indefinable emotion has supplanted
traditional religion and become the ultimate attainment.
In this chapter l shall examine the child's role as the perceiver of "tnue" love in these short stories.
The conceptions of
love presented by the three stories dœtfer greatly, but they have
in common the fact of rébellion against a harshly and vividly
portrayed "norm" of conventional human interaction which is in
some way responsible for the nature of this postulated alternative
of love •
•
27
•
a.
Jean Staf'ford's "The Sho:rn Lamb."
Of the three children studied in this chapter, five-year-old
Hannah has the most chilàish and sensuously oriented conception
of love.
Stafford has portrayed her most obvious need as warm,
caressi~attention
from others; both the lack of it at present
and the strangeness in its expression have made her relatively
passive.
without the affection which has come to her because of
her golden hair, she is indeed a "shorn lamb," ugly and exposed.
1
As in Eudora Welty's "A Memory," little happens outwardly in the
story, yet a crucial event in the child's life is being examined.
References to Hannah are in the third pers on, but the author has
made every attempt to enter her consciousness and view the incident through her eyes.
Both the child's static physical and
emotional position and the long explanation of it by the mother
aid in the accomplishment of this.
Other techniques are more
subtle, such as the reference to the person talking to the baby's
mother as "Aunt Louise," rather than "her sister."
As Hannah
listens to her mother's facile record of her troubles, we see her
own understanding of them chiefly through the device of giving
to the child's mind confused associations: her mother's phrase
"anti-man" reminds her of the "ottomans" by the fireplace and
1
•
In Bad Characters, a volume of short stories by Jean stafford
first collected in 1964, "The Shorn Lamb" is printed, with no
major differences, as "Cops and Robbers." l am using the title
as it appeared in the story's original publication in The New
Yorker, 28 (Jan. 24, 1953), 28-34, in Best American Short Stories,
1950-1954 and~prize Stories 1954: The O. Henry Awards •
28
•
lead her back to the thought of her neglect; what
"spun gold," or "waste"?
~
her curIs,
Stafford is adept at slipping "omniscient"
comment into the narrative where it does not distract the reader,
so that, as in Capote's short story, it is vocabulary and the wellturned phrase which give away the author's perceptions.
For Hannah, "love" is the primary sensation of warmth and protection she had experienced in her parents' soft bed, in what is
now "the privileged cat' s place beside her mother. ,,2
Now she is
left outside like the winter bird she pities in the "frozen,
formaI garden."
The contrast is seen in very simple, natural
terms -- heat and cold, spring and winter, confortable disarray
and structured order, being fussed over, and being left alone.
For example, there are three times "the baby" of five years old
remembers when she "and her hair had been the center of attention."
(p. 222)
It can be no accident that in each of these aIl five
senses are carefully mentioned.
Taste is usually secondary, estab-
lished chiefly through the presence of explicitly described drinks
or food.
The first "hour" Hannah remembers, the time of tea and
candied orange rind before the fire, holds for her "the thought of
her mother's golden hair in the firelight, and the smell of her
perfume in the intimate warmth, and the sound of her voice saying,
'Isn't this gay, Miss Baby?'" (p. 217)
•
The hour of morning
2 Jean Stafford, "The Shorn Lamb," Prize Stories 1954:
The O. Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin (Garden
City, N.Y., 1954), p. 217. Subsequent references will be to
this edition •
29
•
hair-combing and the "other af'ternoons" in the painter's studio
are similar times or attention by the grown-up world which incorporate the same careful pattern of senses.
Love for "baby" is
the basic mothering and cuëlëlling she receives in the "oceanic"
and "bosomy" bed, but other adjectives which describe this object
show it as something less than a symbol of love: it is as "soft
and fat as the gelded white Persian cat," and has "silky depths"
of luxurious pillows and blankets.
It is, in fact, symptomatic
of the "disorder" in the story which l shall consider in Chapter
Five.
But for the child the bed is love and it is only necessary
to note the irony of the fact that it represents this quality only
to her, not to those who, in a normal marriage, would recognize
this value, the parents.
For the present, Hannah must be content with the "mothering
runnels" of her tears, for her mother, who has been the most
important person of her small world, has lost interest in her.
Although to readers now the mother is too reminiscent of the
stereotyped sex-kitten of the Marilyn Monroe era, her sensuality
is perfect for her role here.
Lazy and exotic, she represents aIl
that is perverse in a too refined femininity.
She has completely
captivated Hannah, almost seduced her, as these lines from the
story attest: "Bewitching, indec ipher able , she always dulcified
this ho ur with her smoky, loving voice and her loving fingers. • • •
~sometimes
.a,
her hands would leave the child's head and go to her
own, to stroke it lovingly." (p. 222)
Her surroundings are
30
•
luxurious; she dreams of travel to far-away lands and speaks
familiarly of Chinese and E9yptian "style."
rare and valuable by analogy.
Even her hair is
She is as varied as Cleopatra,
and perhaps as decadent; it is no wonder that she can comprise
an entire world for the child who has failed to recognize the
self-love inherent in her mother's nature.
Th~
masculine world
of this story cannot, in Hannah's mind at least, compete with
such a creature.
The autocratie father offers no alternative
love; indeed, he and the other men mentioned by her mother seem
to be its negation.
The hair of both the mother and Hannah is constantly described
as golden and richly alluring.
Ironically enough, what is usually
a symbol o'f sex is here an object in which a materially described
worth is cortcentrated.
Only the youngest chi Id recognizes the
fact that love for the person has been
disp~aced
to the haire
That the golden hair of the two is interchangable in importance
is obvious in the mother's remark that the cutting of the baby's
curIs was symbolic of the cutting of her own and her gesture of
stroking her own hair instead of the child's, a telling detail
indicative of her selfishness.
Actually, the warping or love
into selr-Iove is the "matter" or the tale; in a familial atmosphere such as this the child cannot but follow the pattern.
The
marriage of the pare·nts i$..."bQund, not by love, but by social concepts of "bad form" and the fact of the five children.
Neither is
the "friendship" between the mother and Rob a mature one.
It simply
31
•
o:f:fers a gentle "way out" :for the mother :from a domination by
the male "epees"
on the wall.
'" '"
I:f love, :for Hannah, is beauty and sensuous warmth, its absence
is the "ugly and ungenerous;" "narrow and splintery," attic stairs
where !Üle now sits, shut out like a winter bird, shut in like the
"stingy and lonesome" bees.
individuality.
Loss o:f love involves a loss o:f
Hannah is constantly re:ferred to in comparative
phrases and epithets.
Only the narrator uses her personal name.
The boys calI her a "skinned cat," and a
"mushroom~'
:for example,
and the members o:f the household, in general, treat her as "the
car or a piece o:f :furniture."
made her so
\vithout the attentions which have
devo~ependent,
she is less a person.
"She
:felt that she was already shrinking and :fading, that aIl her rights
o:f being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away.
Ghilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless,
invisible." (p. 224) A:fter Mattie's rejection o:f her love, she
turns to the snow.
It represents to her the same escape as it
does to Paul o:f Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
Its
"sleep" is death and a cessation o:f unhappiness.
Jean Sta:f:ford, then, sees the child as especially sensitive
in :feeling and reacting to the nuances o:f love and the lack o:f
love.
By entering into the child's mind, she is able to de:fine
some o:f the subtle shades o:f intuitive understanding and rational
misunderstanding which comprise the consciousness o:f a child o:f
•
:five.
She is commenting, through this sadly thought:ful child, on
32
•
the fact that unloving natures perpetuate themselves in their
children.
And the failure of love, or what is taken by
th~
child
as love, is of overwhelming importance.
b.
Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory."
The definition of "love" for the spokesman of Truman Capote
'nt. \)..~.....'ft\ M
in his "A Christmas Memory" bears a resemblance to that of {arson
McCullers' "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud."
Beginning with love for
simple objects such as those in the stories t t:itle., he has perfected his science to the point where he is a master of its
intricacies.
He can love anything: "No longer do 1 have to think
about it even, 1 see a street full of people and a beautiful light
comes in me. •
He can love everything and everybody.
To
love a woman is the last step, to be taken after a long educative
process.
In Capote's The Grass Harp Judge Cool questions Colin:
"How could you care about one girl?
Have yibu ever cared about one
leaf?"~ and Dolly ramembers her "first loves, .. • • " a dried honey-
comb, • • • a jaybird's egg.,,5
For these two, love is a chain of
love, as nature is a chain of life,,,6 and the heart must be
trained in the process, the art, of loving.
Buddy and his "friend" who are so similar to the Co1.in and
Dolly of
•
~ ~
Harp are joined by the ability to love.
One a
3 Carson McCullers, "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," Prize stories
1943: The O. Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin
(Garden City, N. Y., 1943), p. 230.
4 Capote, Harp, p. 75.
5
Capote, Harp, p. 76.
6 Capote, Harp, p. 75.
33
•
child, the other "still a child," they alone can be unashamed of
a squeeze of the hand "I-love-you."
And they are apparently
being educated in the love of the smal! things first -- the wainuts,
the kites, the trimmings of the Christmas tree, the fruitcakes.
The adjectives used to describe these and other objects show, even
more than careful observation, a caressing, happy
~
for them.
The love of the two is selfless -- the "friend" remarks that
"It's bad enough in life to do without something you want; but
confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody
something you want them to have." (p. 124)
This is surely a more mature view of relationships than Hannah's,
but Capote has adapted it to his own purposes, changing it into one
more isolating agent in the worid of these two "children."
That
only they, a child and his simple-minded cou.sin, are able to love
is dangerously in the James M. Barrie tradition which we noted
before in relation to this story.
At the talets end Buddy expects
to see "rather like hearts, a lost pair of kit es hurrying toward
heaven." (p. 127) The "irreplaceable part of myself" that is let
loose like a kite is the ability to love
heart.
completely~
with a
w~ole
The death of his childhood symbolized by this death of
his ide al friend is aiso the end of this talent, and again we note
the unbridgeable gap between childhood and adulthood implicit in
this story.
An adult can perhaps be a "friend," if he shows the
requisite sensibility, but his is incapable of being the "best
•
friend" of anyone •
34
•
The ideal love portrayed here is of a special kind.
As
Hannah's was that of the "baby," Buddy's is that of a "buddy,"
of one pre-adolescent boy for another.
Although it is sober in
its approach and offers a contrast to instant boy-meets-girl love,
it is puerile in its nature of a defense against an uncomprehending
world.
Capote's search for the truth of love in this story fails.
"Best friends" the two may be, but mature lovers of people they
are not, for their love draws them chiefly to themselves.
c.
.J. D. SaI inger' s "Teddy."
As it is Salinger who has attempted to create the personification of the word "love" in his fictional char acter Seymour
Glass, it is he who has portrayed a child who best understands
love in his short story "Teddy."
When the author observes that
Teddy has "too little of that cute solemnity that Many adults
readily speak up, or down to,"
nearly undermines his tale.
7
however, he states a
parad~which
We can imagine that it would be diffi-
cult to determine how to address Teddy; in his constant probe of
what is behind every value, Salinger has created an impossible
child.
The story is a vehicle for the projection of his specifie
ideas.
l have said that the child, for our century, has become
the final representative of primary values, but Salinger has
replaced childhood with mysticism.
•
A child such as Teddy is, in
7 J. D. Salinger, "Teddy," Nine Stories (New York, 1964), p. 178.
Subsequent references will be to this edition. "Teddy" was originally published in The New Yorker, 28 (January 31, 1953), 26-34 •
35
•
Ihab Hassan's words, "the last resort of innocence,,,8 and that is
the chief reason for his existence.
At first glance it seems less necessary for Teddy to be a child
than Hannah and Buddy.
ever age.
A mystic is, after aIl, a mystic, at what
Yet the fact that he is young adds another level of
meaning to the story.
Teddy is a child, yet he is wise with a
sober maturity usually associated with experience.
Going beyond
this, there is his advocation of the symbolic "vomiting up" of the
apple which is the act of freeing oneself from "logic and intellectuaI stuff," a return to an animal innocence before the fall.
In
Teddy's words, the process is "emptying out," rather than learning.
If one is a baby, it is the act of self-discovery which is still a
type of "unlearning."
The fact of age has little to do with this
sort of acquired innocence,
as Booper's behavior testifies.
True
innocence is lost soon after birth and in its recovery one moves
to the extremity of self-knowledge where knowledge is innocence.
And then one achieves -- what?
Everything, of course, the
innocence which is our knowledge, the loss of consciousness which
is the highest consciousness, the God which is our love.
Everything
carried to an extreme meets its opposite and the author has a good
reality-illusion controversy with sides being taken by Teddy and
Bob Nicholson.
However, Bob's "reality" turns out to be illusion
and what at first appears to be Teddy's "illusion" ends up as
reality.
•
8
This is aIl relatively neat.
Ihab Hassan, p. 276.
36
•
But what of love?
Teddy appears to be an unloving child,
in the xinal analysis he must be the most loving.
50
Actually, he
replaces the term "love" at least as it is applied to human relationships with the word "affinity."
Hindu sense of a union with God.
opened up wide enough."
"Love" is taken more in the
It etan be attained if "you
And this is the reason for Teddy's death.
In his terms, death is the fulfillment of life, for it is the
means of "stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice."
(p. 191)
The ending implies that he, of aIl the children we are
considering, finally encompasses his conception of love.
About "affinity" Teddy says little, but it appears that if one
"loves" in "that way" one accepts another without attempting to
change and tries toreach people by simple acts of kindness.
Teddy's few actions show a pattern which conforms to this philosophy.
He is persistently kind to Nicholson and others who tend
to be "kittenish."
His "affinity" for his parents enablE!s him to
clean up their ashes and wear their dogtags without criticizing
them.
He even dislikes hearing them castigated as being outside
some norm of genius-parent behavior.
It is essential that he does
not confuse the externality of their views of life with their selves.
The conception of such an austere and dedicated love is
salinger's answer to the existent "unreliable" love which he
portrays to the point of caricature in the parents, who exhibit
the selfish love which seeks to change.
•
It is perceptive to say
that such people "love their reasons for loving us almost as much
37
•
as they love
USa"
(p. 187)
This, Salinger is saying, is how the
majority of people love; there is barely a pretense.
A substitute
for mother love is automatically requested by the mothex, who
demands and receives one token kiss.
Her use of the words "Darling"
and "lover" rapes them of aIl affection.
Both sne and the narcis-
sistic father try to change their children in small nagging ways.
It is no wonder that Booper hates them(and Teddy as the emissary
of their health-directed order) and "everybody in this ocean."
What seems essentially unreal in Salinger's alternative to this
joyless love is the criticism of aIl human enotions.
The achieve-
ment of true love has been elevated from its place in this reservoir
of natural feeling to the realm of the inhuman.
Where the normal
"baby" such as Hannah of "The Shorn Lamb" is dominated by sensations and her emotional reactions to them, however unrobust, Teddy
discounts such zesponsci.s entirely.
anything.
They simply are not "good" for
In particular, they should never be projected into
"things that have no emotions" such as poetry.
This does not seem
a matter of semantics, for at several points Teddy quarrels with
"naming" objects and feelings; definition is a limit he would not
impose.
He really is an unemotional child.
doesn't "use" them.
If he has emotions he
Again it is a matter of extremes.
Peeling off
layers of acquired culture we find not the expected basic inStinctive responses to life but a lack of them.
In Teddy we are not
discovering a childlike animal being but a most refined one.
•
sounds weIl in theory.
This
But an earthly reader must be forgiven if
38
•
he finds Teddy a stark, cold child whose love contrasts unfavorably
with human needs for security and relationship.
l think we must
finally say that the strength of Salinger's depiction of two contrasting "loves" inthis story lies in thenegative power of his
satiric portraits of the parents, Booper, and Bob Nicholson.
d.
Summary.
Jean stafford, Capote, and salinger have in these short stories
betrayed their very human uncertainty of a final deiinition of love,
but they have made it outstandingly clear what they are rebelling
against.
Adult pettiness and stereotyped behavior which reveals a
lack of love rather than actual emotion are shown to be the components of the adult worlds.
Only in Capote's short story, where
the concept of love is implied more than it is directly stated, is
the bulk of the narrative given to descriptions of actively loving
behavior.
Both Buddy and Hannah are romantically viewed; because they
have not learned, or at least submitted to, adult behavior patterns,
they are uninhibited in their visions of love.
Hannah is at one of
those difficult moments when one aspect of her enveloping protection
of illusions is being destroyed.
with Mattie's rejection of her one
gesture of love she may weIl become a miniature of her unfeeling
mother.
She is the youngest of these loving young people, and the
lack of both "cuddling" and attention which are
•
50
important to a
baby produce a little girl warped in her perception of love.
is completely enveloped in her vision of true affection.
Miss
She
39
.'
StafIord views the child as having the capacity to give himselI
over completely, no matter how dependently and passively, to such
love and to be intimately afIected by response to it.
This
totality oI being is Hannah's contribution to the child's ability
to love.
Buddy's comparable contribution is unselIishness.
He and his
"Iriend" are seen as very natural and spontaneous beings.
They
dance when they are happy, are swayed by changes oI weather, and
cry when they are hurt.
And their lack oI selIishness is a
similar consequence oI their closeness to nature.
Civilization
and adulthood strip the person oI such innate qualities rather
than endow him with them.
The majority oI the adults oI this
story, like those referred to in Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince,
are too bothered with "matters oI consequence" to be spontaneously
giving and loving.
Capote's tale is the most sentimental OI aIl
oI these analyzed here, Ior in Buddy and his "Iriend" the reader
may see personified the inborn goodness oI "original innocence."
Salinger's more philosophie concept oI the chi Id and true
afIection emphasizes similar unselIishness -- active loving Ior
Salinger discounts the selI and its wants entirely -- but it seems
that this quality is not a native emotion, for these are discounted
as useless.
The reader never knows exactly how one learns to love
as Teddy can, but, as with Hannah and Buddy, the action involves
the entire being and cannot be divorced Irom other segments oI his
•
40
•
character.
Perhaps it is this Ïact which aIl these authors are
intending to stress.
None oÏ them have to oÏÏer a deÏinite
answer to the question, "What is love?" but they aIl emphasize
the importance oÏ love Ïor the child and their whole-hearted
reaction to its display •
•
41
•
Chapter IV.
The Child's Ability to Go Beyond Organized
Religion: Flannery O'Connor's "The River,"
Philip Roth's "The Conversion
oÎ
the Jews,"
and J. D. Salinger's "Teddy."
The assumption that the child is best able to perce ive religious
truth has two sources
~n
British romantic literature.
William
Blake Îirst deÎined the dichotomy between innocence and experience
within a religious Îramework.
A natural, pagan joy in existence
coupled with a simple perception
oÎ
Christianity, is set against
the corruption oÎ the established church.
Qualities oÎ intrinsic
joy, mildness, and native sympathy which Blake adds to the concept
oÎ
by
the child are similar to those oÎ the ideal Christian stressed
the teachings
oÎ
Christ.
The child and his relationship to
God is the concern oÎ the three stories l am analyzing in this
.,
1
chapter, but none oÎ their creations have the austere na1vete oÎ
Blake's chimney sweep or his little black boy.
Here are lines
about the Îormer:
And the angel told Tom, iÎ he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God Îor his Îather, and never want joy.l
It is this single-minded dedication to a Îew very basic perceptions
oÎ
God that has been used by Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, and
J. D. Salinger in the short stories l am analyzing here.
\oJordsworth' s "Immortality Ode" also presents an inÏluential
•
l William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper," Selected Poems oÎ
William Blake, ed. F. W. Bateson (London, 1961), p. 25.
42
•
concept linking the child and God, although it is used directly in
only one o:f these short stories, Salinger's "Teddy."
For the child
o:f this story lines such as these :from the Ode would be relevant:
Our birth is but a sleep and a :forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our li:fe's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh :from a:far:
Not in entire :forget:fulness,
And not in ut ter nakedness,
But trailing clouds o:f glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our in:fancy!2
For Teddy, too, proximity to God is something lost through normal
education rather than gained.
The simple belie:f that God "is
our home" is common to Teddy's and Wordsworth's belie:fs; both
lament the ruin o:f the initially :fEee person who simply "is a
certain way."
a.
Flannery O'Connor's "The River."
"1 see :from the standpoint o:f Christian orthodoxy.
This means
that :for me the meaning o:f li:fe is centered in our Redemption by
Christ and that what l see in the world l see in relation to that.,,3
These words, Miss O'Connor's own, should be kept in mind in an
analysis o:f her short story "The River."
This tale o:f a small boy
who walks into a river in the hope o:f :finding there "the Kingdom o:f
•
2 \villiam Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations o:f Immortality :from
Recollections o:f Early Childhood," Wordsworth's Poetical Works,
ed. Thomas Hutchison, A New Edition, revised by Ernest de
Selincourt (London, 1904), p. 460.
3 Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction VJriter and His Country,"
The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Granville Hicks (New York,
1957), p. 162 •
43
•
Christ" is not a wholly sentimental or ironie comment on the extent
to which a childts misunderstanding or adult words can lead him,
though l suspect that the story has elements or both irony and
pit y, understated as these May be.
The intensity of Miss otConnorts
faith colors the tone or I!The River" and, indeed, aIl her riction.
Her view or Harry is in the romantic tradition: as an innocent
child he really
~
been able to comprehend the truth of God and
Christ and he acts accordingly.
As the mistake in name imp1ies,
it is this "Bevell! who is the spiritual center or the tale.
In
his experience there are two places, one where everything is a
"joke," which l sha1l consider in the nest chapter on "disorder,"
and one where there are I!no jokes."
Although it is evident that
Miss O'Connor's views do not coincide with those or the people at
the evange1ical healing depicted here, neither her beliefs nor
theirs are "jokes."
At the beginning of the story Harry is presented as wholly
innocent of aIl re1igious knowledge.
He was made by a doctorj if
he had thought or "Jesus Christ" at aIl, "he would have thought
f.i::7 was
a word like ' oh' or 'damn t or 'God ' ,,4
AS an inexper ienced
child of "four or rive years," his f'irst perceptions of Christ are
uncluttered by any abstract connections.
of "a man wearing a white sheet."
•
The picture of Jesus is
The evocative, rich1y imagiatic
4 F1annery O'Connor, I!The River," Three bl' Flannery O'Connor
(New York, 1964), p. 149. Subsequent rererences will be to this
edition. "The Riv~r" was rirst eollected in A Good Man is Hard
to Find (New York, 1955) •
44
•
words of the preacher impress him.
The red and the gold col ors
with which Miss O'Connor has painted the image of the preacher
standing in the river are those of beauty and vitality.
"There ain't but one river and that's the River of Life, maàe
out of Jesus' Blood.
in, in the River
oÎ
That's the river you have to lay you pain
Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of
Love, in the rich red river
oÎ
Jesus' Blood, you people!" (p. 151)
Such words, repetitious, simple, and direct in appeal, lead Harry
to believe he
~
go to "the Kingdom of Christ" under the river
not that he understands what this means.
But he perceives that if
he goes under the river he does not "go back to the apartment" and
that, for him, is a reasonable alternative.
In his search for this
"Kingdom of Christ" there is no confusion and only one minute of
hesitation; he seeks for a better place to be and he finds it.
The
irony lies not in his aisunderstanding of what the preacher was
telling the people, for it
was true comprehension, but in the fact
that for him and for everyone this "place" is death.
As a child,
then, Harry has reached a conclusion l have noticed in other short
stories here: that the only escape Îrom the burden of reality lies
in the sleep of death.
Teddy, Hannah, and Paul also withdrew from
the world; Harry's specifie retreat is from boredom.
The presentation of the existing religion of the story, that
of the people at the healing, is factual.
through the eyes of the boy.
•
Miss O'Connor sees them
Although her perceptions are not as
submerged in his as those of Aiken's are in Paul's, she enjoys
45
•
simply giving details and restricting her comments to those of a
child Harry's age, a technique she uses again in "A Temple of the
Holy Ghost" of the same volume.
Through her exact and unpretty
representation of dialogue she lets the people at the healing give
themselves away, as is typical in her fiction.
Their religion
which is so luxuriously colored by the words of the preacher is,
as it is for Harry, an escape.
The healer harps on the river's
ability to carry away one's pain and sorrow.
His phrases, imagi-
native as they seem to Harry, are largely ignorant, hackneyed
rant designed as an emotional appeal.
Yet the chief skeptic of this religion, Mr. Paradise, is aIl
too clearly indicated by traditional methods as a devil.
Sever al
times he is connected to the "grey and sour-Iooking" pigs which
Harry has just learned are chased out of men by Jesus.
Further
support for his position as the representative of the baser, more
earthly elements of man is found in references to him as "some
ancient water monster" -- an indication of his bestial nature -and "an old boulder."
Even color shows his position in the tale:
the "purple bulge" of cancer on his head -- a physical sign of
moral decay -- as weIl as the orange of his gas pumps and soda are
picked up by "the orange and purple gulley beside the road." (p.149)
Fictional connections to the earth are usually favorable, but the
garishly colored land of "The River" is harsh and unregenerating.
It contains nothing positive; it is a fallen world •
•
46
•
Mr. Paradise is marked as a devil chiefly, however, by his
grotesque appearance, which Harry immediately shuns.
Because of
her frequent depiction of the grotesque, Miss O'Connor is most
often discussed as a "southern gothic" writer, and her vision of
the twisted creatures sh. portrays does coincide with the use of
the deformed and tortured psyches of gothic fiction: such characters
embody the forces of evil and unhealthy degeneration in the story.
Critics of Miss O'Connor's fiction have found them physical embodiments of "the inner horrors of sin."S
Her own words support these
assumptions, for .he has explained what others have termed her
"gothic" vision in the same article quoted above:
"The novelist
with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which
are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear
as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as
natural.,,6
In order to project this vision of "the perverse and
• • • the unacceptable"
7
she is forced to "shock -- to the hard of
hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and
.
~.
8
startll.ng
..Ll.gures."
Although Mr. Paradise is perhaps one of the
least completely drawn figures among Miss O'Connor's gothic
portraits, he does represent the evil of disorder inherent of aIl
of them.
Ironically enough, it is he who gives Harry the final
S Ollye Tine Snow, "The Functional Gothic of Flannery
O'Connor, The Southwest Review L (1965), 287.
6 O'Connor, "Fiction writer," pp. 162-163.
7 O'Connor, "Fiction writer," p. 162.
•
8
O'Connor, "Fiction writer," p. 163 •
47
•
impetus toward "paradise" with his "red and white club."
Harry is not a "good" boy in the Christian sense, for he lies
and steals, yet this vision of the grotesque is the final weight
on the opposite forces of the story which elevate him to a connection with ultimate good.
It makes apparent the blackness and
whiteness of Miss O'Connor's spiritual world which .he projects
in her fiction, where "My God" and "for Christ's sake" mean two
different things to two groups of people.
b.
Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews."
The use of the child's ingenuous question as a method of
approaching existent beliefs and institutions is an old one.
For
our culture it begins with the church-school room print of a
beatific child Jesus disputing with the eIders and continues through
such figures as Paul Dombey (who asks, if money could do anything,
"why didn't it save me my malUla?"),9 James's Maisie, and the little
boy who asks why the kipg has nothing on in "The Emperor's New
Clothes."
Our century has tended to ascribe this knack of as king
the question to the adolescent such as Updike's David Kern and
.Yoyce's stephen.
Ozzie, of Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the
Jews," is thirteen, but his relationship to his question is so
childlike that l feel justified in analyzing it here.
His inquiry
concerns sex, the usual problem of the adolescent, but it relates
sex only very indirectly to himself.
•
Ozzie is still the precocious
9 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London, 1948), p. 67 •
48
•
child with a history oÎ embarrassing queries rather th&n the
smirking adolescent such as Itzie.
Ozzie's question is this:
• • iÎ He cou1d make aIl jthe
"•
creatioEV in six days, and He could pick the six days he wanted
right out oÎ nowhere, why couldn't He let a woman have a baby
without having intercourse?"IO
child.
Ozzie is not a Wordsworthian
His "clouds oÎ glory" come Îrom his own actions, not
Îrom any native proximity to God.
For Wordsworth, aIl children
were born with such misty halos, not just one, and the other boys
oÎ
the story trail no clouds.
Neither, at times, does Ozzie, Îor
his Îeeling oÎ "Peace" and "Power" which he Îirst experiences on
top oÎ the building is not too laudab1e.
Yet he is an individual
with a deep and pervasive apprehension of God's power.
He is
convinced that God can do anything, and this belieÎ neat1y destroys
erudite theological arguments.
To Ozzie, people 1ike the Rabbi
Binder, who attempt to limit his power, "don't know anything about
God." (p. 146)
His steady belieÎ puts his mother and the rabbi to
shame.
IÎ
it is not because as a child he is close to God that he asks
the question, then, what qualities oÎ the child prompt his argument?
Originally he does lack know1edge.
•
His des ire to know "something
10 Philip Roth, "The Conversion of the Jews," Goodbye, Columbus
and Five Short stories (Cleveland, Ohio, 1960), p. 141. Subsequent
reÎerences will be to this edition. "The Conversion oÎ the Jews"
was original1y published in The Paris Review, 18 (Spring, 1958),
23-40 •
49
•
different" is the initial impetus behind the question.
uninhibi ted about asking i t.
And he is
He is not, l ike Itzie, awa,re of the
unacceptableness of his phrasing for his age group.
He simply asks.
Unlike Paul Dombey, however, Ozzie is aware of the import of his
question.
Although he scarcely expects to receive an answer that
will destroy his question, he is still sincere in asking it.
His
ability to question der ives from the primacy of his ideas, which
are viewed as positive attributes of childhood.
Ozzie is "child
and logician," able, with his command of natural logic, to question
with validity and cogency.
And he succeeds.
Philip Roth's attitude toward his story is never as clear as
Miss O'Connor's toward "The River."
He is satirizing in this story,
not the Jewish religion, but the more external characteristics of
the Jewish immigrant.
Yakov Blotnik and certain modes of expression
such as "A martyr l have" are +0'ùched upon as only an author wi th
intimate knowledge of the culture can do -- with warm, affectionate
humor.
These and the epithets "bull" and "bastard" used in connec-
tion with his question, and the witt Y comments such as those applied
to Itzie undercut what might be a sober story.
sums up his position.
The final halo image
On the surface, it carries with it aIl the
expressive sarcasm of Mrs. Freedman's gesture of lowering her arms
and her words, "A martyr l have.
Look! • • • • My martyr," (p. 155)
which reduces the action to the purely factual level.
Ozzie is,
after aIl just a boy who has accidently found himself on a roof.
•
Yet he really is ready at one point to choose martyrdom.
He is
50
•
ready to jump because Itzie has given him the suggestion:
Suddenly, looking up into that unsympathetic sky, Ozzie realized
aIl the strangene'ss o:f what these people, his :friends, were
asking: they wanted him to jump, to kill himsel:fj they were
singing about it now -- it made them happy. And there was an
even greater strangeness: Rabbi Binder was on his knees, trembling.
I:f there was a question to be asked now it was not "Is it me?"
but rather "Is it us? •• Is it us?"
Being on the roo:f, it turned out, was a serious thing. I:f
he jumped would the singing become dancing? \oJould it? \oJhat
would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open
the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on
the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON'T JUMP. (p.156)
Ozzie is ready to be a "Martin" rather than disappoint his
:friends.
But isn't this the same thing as being a "ill;lrtyr" rather
than live where the ultimate power o:f God is denied?
wonder that his new question is "Is it
US?
• • Is
It' is no
it us?"
The
last image o:f Ozzie's jump into "the center o:f the yellow net
that glowed in the eveningts edge like an overgrown halo" (p. 158)
is appropriate.
Ozzie does not die, so he is not technically a
martyr, but, :for success:fully upholding his belie:fs, he can wear
a halo -- overgrown, :for he has questioned with "adult" wisdom.
c.
J. D. Salinger's "Teddy."
Teddy's convictions, like those o:f Ozzie and Harry, reach their
apotheosis at the story's end; he too wins a "halo."
belie:fs have little to do with organized religion.
are, i:f we are to believe salinger, his own.
direct and uncomplex.
But his
His perceptions
His link to God is
Be:fore going on to discuss his speci:fic
comprehension o:f God, it is necessary to consider how re:fined, yet
•
simple, his notion is.
Primarily, it has no boundaries o:f subject
•
matter.
l have probably discussed much of this material in my
chapter on the child and love for this reason.
For Teddy, aIl
such abstractions as "God," "love," "death," "life," "man," and
"matter" are intimately related.
In discussing God we are dis-
cussing them aIl; their acknowledgement requires aIl of Teddy's
self.
Salinger intimates this, a bit too teasingly, in Teddy's
reply to Bob Nicholson's remark, "As l understand it • • • you hold
pretty firmly to. the Vedantic theory of reincarnation."
Teddy
answers, "lt isn't a theQry, it's as much a part --" (p. 188)
The implication is that incarnation, for Teddy, is an established
and unarguable facto
One doesn't debate this because it does not
belong in the category of ideas which might, in another's mind,
be alterecd.
Ideas imply "Logic and intellectual stuff" (p. 191)
which we must forget.
"1 was six when l saw that everything was God, and my hair
stood up, and aIl that. •
It was on a Sunday, l remember.
f>ly sister was only a very tiny child then, and _he was drinking
her milk, and aIl of a sudden l saw that she was God and the
milk was God. l Mean, aIl she was doing ;as pouring God into
GOd' if you know what l mean." (p. 189)
This happening, what Bob Nicholson terms lia mystical experience,"
takes Teddy out of "the finite dimensions."
sider "consciousness" is involved.
A loss of what we con-
One gathers through Teddy's
words that one meditates, and, if one does this weIl, one is
allowed to "stop and stay" "with God, where it's real1y nice"
.-
(p. 191) in a reservoir of bliEisful existence where our "life"
plays no part.
In this event one is not reincarnated and sent
back to earth; "consciousness" is permanent1y lost.
52
•
One's critical attitude toward salinger's "Teddy" will necessarily be colored by the extent to which one is sympathetic toward
Zen.
A dislike oÎ its basic tenems will activate a dislike oÎ
Salinger's ideas and make the story almost impossible to enjoy.
reaction such as George Steiner's is likely to set in:
A
he considers
that Salinger suggests to his young readers "that Îormal ignorance,
political apathy and a vague tristesse are positive virtues.
This
is where his cunning and somewhat shoddy use oÎ Zen comes in.
•
•
.e
h·10n.', Il
1S
'lln
..Las
l
Zen
gather that Steiner chieÎly deplores any sim-
plification which may become popularized.
Although l tend to con-
sider the essential message oÎ Teddy's philosophy concerning the
wholeness and imperviousness oÎ liÎe worthwhile, l too sense a
little uneasiness in the story.
There is Îirst the Îact that Teddy is a child, even though he
is a genius-child.
oÎ
The child's traditional role as the perceiver
simple truth has its eÎÎect, making it diÎÎicult to doubt the
clarity oÎ his vision.
oÎ
his way oÎ liÎe.
And there are problems in the mechanics
Why, Îor example, iÎ you are "making good
spiritual advancement," meet a "lady," and stop meditating, is
the punishment necessarily returning to liÎe in an American Îorm?
This is surely one oÎ salinger's little jokes.
But Teddy deÎinitely
Il George Steiner, "The Salinger Industry," Salinger:
A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. Henry Anatole Grunwald
(New York, 1963), p. 91 •
•
53
•
lacks a sense o:f humor,
50
mouth it's aIl too serious.
when Salinger puts such words in his
The prophecies and Teddy's death
itself are technicalities, especially the exact date.
Are they
jokes too?
Isa Kapp
Presumably note
Salinger is fond of Zen.
notes the fact that Salinger must "bolster a mention of • • • Zen
Buddhism by a frank, virile burst of swear words, or an apologetic
phrase.,,12
This device of "playing down" erudition is aIl too
noti~ble in "Teddy," where there are few big words and many
"
phrases such as "get the heck out of your body," and l never saw
such a bunch of apple eaters."
These may be devices to make Teddy
seem little-boyish, like his run-down clothes and "incongruously
handsome" aligator belt and his use of the word "lady."
But it
may also be that this uneasiness arises from an awareness of the
hopelessness o:f trying to put in New Yorker terms such a complex
theory.
What Teddy is saying is, after aIl, immensely involved,
and yet very simple.
We can note again the meeting-of-the-extremes.
The chi Id Teddy has worked his way through the intellectual maze
and come out with his basic ideas on the nature o:f "God," "love,"
and "everything."
d.
His perception is that it is very simple.
Summary.
The children of these three short stories are performing their
traditional roles as critics o:f organized religion through their
innate perceptions o:f God.
•
Only in "Teddy," as l have noted in the
12 Isa Kapp, "Easy Victory," Salinger, pp. 87-88 •
54
•
introduction to this chapter, is the concept of the child's proximit y to God directly stated.
For both Miss O'Connor and Philip Roth
other attributes of the child such as ingenuousness lead him to
make his critical action rather than his native closeness to God.
Harry suffers from a lack of religious trainingj starved for some
realization of an explanation of his existence, he grasps at the
evangelist's revelation of Christ and goes to seek Him.
It is his
child's intuition of the truth in the jumble of phrases which Miss
O'Connor is underlining here.
is doubtful.
Whether Harry is a "romantic" child
This ability to quickly understand what will fulfill
his spiritual needs and to act accordingly points to a closeness to
God, yet Miss O'Connor makes it clear that to be fully "Christian"
Harry must be given instruction.
In this case the author's relig-
ious stance prevents sentimentality.
The complexities of Christian
doctrine, like the social behavior in which Harry is deficient,
must be taught.
Miss O'Connor's child is able to intuit only its
basic concepts.
We know even less about the origin of Itzie's relationship to
God, but it is obvious that Roth places ev en less value than Miss
O'Connor on points of doctrine.
not a Wordsworthian child.
As l have noted above, Ozzie is
Perhaps he is too old; his comprehen-
sion of God is necessarily eclectic, drawn tioth from his own intimations and from his education.
He performs his function of
..
,.
religious critic perfectly, for he has the attributes of naivete
•
and sincerity he needs to ask the question which will undermine the
55
•
existing religion.
As Teddy's perception or the all-encompassing nature of love
summarizes the contribution of the child to that concept,
50
his
ideas of religion draw together what the child can offer to a
sense of God.
Aware of the immense complexities or Hindu mysticism,
Teddy still asserts that the concept of God is uncomplex.
The less
a chi Id has been influenced by patent ideas about the world he
lives in, the more he is able to comprehend the nature of God.
His
ability comes from a certain naturalness and lack of adult fears
of death or social stigmas.
These notions are also basic to the
child in the fiction of Miss O'Connor and Philip Roth and to
Buddy's "friend" in Capote's short story.
We can note again the
belief of these authors that the primitive mind is superior in
its perception of fundamental truths •
•
56
•
Chapter V.
Disorder and Early Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's
"The River," Jean Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb,"
and Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path
to Wisdom."
Like Thomas Mann, whose short story gives this chapter its
title, the writers of the short stories of this chapter foc us
upon the subtle effect of family and social disorder upon the
child.
It is interesting to note that the mother, in aIl three
stories, is the chief agent of a lack of pattern.
T~e
conven-
tion of child-rearing in our society stresses her warmth,
tiveness, and steadiness
year.
a~
protec~
necessary during the child's first
As the components of her blood pass to the blood of her
unborn child, so contentment or unrest in her life intimately
affects him after his birth.
Her relationship to her husband
is of similar importance, as the last two stories analyzed will
illustrate.
Miss Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb" treats the subject
sentimentally; attention is centered in the pathos of the neglected
child.
"The Downward Path to Wisdom," by Katherine Ann Porter, is
more analytical and provides a transition to a more psychologically
oriented viewpoint.
In her story, we are limited to a child's mind
and his perception of events •
•
57
•
a.
Flannery O'Connor's "The River."
l begin with a st ory much more in the tradition of the
"disorder" theme, "The River" by Flannery O'Connor.
This story
raises the problem from the individual family to the structure of
the society in which it exists, as does Mann's short'story.
Here
the child's consciousness is a finely balanced device which can be
swayed at any moment by forces of dissension and unrest which have
no direct bearing on its life. , The child's first entry into prose
was in this
;o.uù,
but the stress was placed, not on his reactions,
but upon the society which his sadness comments upon.
For Dickens,
for example, the child preserved the innocence and freedom from
hackneyed modes of thought which he had had in a pastoral setting,
but he was removed to a squalid city background.
This made it
necessary for his native purity to be in constant collision with
the brutal actualities of sIum life and he became tough-minded,
able to withstand the constant assaalt upon his integrity.
Like
machines of virtue, such children as Paul Dombey and Sissy Jupe
gave fresh opinions about the institutions of their time.
But the child of "The River," and, actually, of all these
stories, has changed.
He is softer, more human, more childlike.
Harry, who is "four or five years old," has not the initial vision
of right and wrong to guide him and he is lees bold in his criticism of his elders.
He can be swayed by their opinions.
Not his
questions, but his behavior, passes judgment upon the society
•
around him.
Harry ultimately rejects the world of "the apartment,"
the world of jokes.
58
•
We have seen in the previous chapter the polarities oÏ Miss
O'Connor's vision and her adherence to Christian orthodoxy.
Her
disapproval oÏ Harry's parents is obvious in Many details.
From
the Ïather's "aÏter-thought" goodbye to his son to the mother's
badgering over the day's experiences we sense that they are careless, thoughtless people.
To aIl appearances they are absorbed
in a round oÏ parties where hangovers and anchovy paste take
precedence over normal routine.
The alI-important mother is a
sloppy housekeeper, as the condition oÏ her reÏrigerator testiÏies.
Mrs. Connin's Ïirst view oÏ her indicates disapproval:
"That would be her, Mrs. Connin decided, in the black britches
-- long black satin britches and bareÏoot sandals and red
toenails.
She was lying on halÏ the soÏa, with her knees crossed
in the air and her head propped on the arme
(p. 154)
She didn't get up."
Her"red toenail~' and "long black satin britches" May be
external signs oÏ a grotesque nature, but it is her language
which betrays her as a "black" character oÏ the story's opposing
Ïorces.
"Who ever heard oÏ anybody named Bevel," she exclaims
rudely, and "My God! what a name."
Her careless use oÏ "God"
places her in the category oÏ those Ïor whom such words are simply
exclamations.
Part oÏ the "disorder" oÏ the story comes Ïrom the
Ïact that neither she nor the Ïather have religious belieÏs (she
despises baptism), nor have they instilled them into their child.
.'
That Harry has been given no perception oÏ religion is
undoubtedly a black mark in Miss O'Connor's book.
She does not
comment upon the lack oÏ standards in the couple; she merely allows
59
•
Harry's comments upon his home life to reveal the parents' conduct.
His thought "Where he lived everything was a joke" (p. 153) implies
a world with no :fixed moral values.
This may be only one dissolute
couple, but, since the other people at their party seem little
different, it is likely that they are meant to be symptomatic of
a larger social disorder.
This is Miss O'Connor's expression of
opinion of a value-less group of "modern" people.
Their amoral state has its effect upon their child.
since Harry
has no perception of God or any moral imperatives he lies and steals
as a matter of course.
He is far from an 110riginally innocent l1
child; he must be educated in the ways of God before he can be
considered truly a social being.
have been neglected.
And aIl points of his education
Part of "motherly love" is helping the child
to separate himself from the family and learn of new experiences.
Clauses such as "You found out more when you left where you lived l1
(p. 149) are evidence of her neglect.
But when Miss O'Connor tells
us that in the world of the "apartment" I1There was very little to
do at any time but eat" (p. 157), we realize that Harry' 5 major
complaint is boredom.
grow.
without new experiences a child ceases to
It is interesting to note that, as in Aiken's "Silent Snow,
Secret Snow," the child's withdrawal from the world centers about
his rejection of the mother.
When she enters Harry's room to calI
him back from his oblivion in sleep, .he takes the same hateful
form as Paul's mother, that of someone forcefully dragging him back
•
to an existence he detests.
As Paul must vanish into his snow
dream to be free from her, 50 must Harry go away to the river to
60
•
escape her "bitter breath": even in his half-sleep he hears "her
voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she
on top of it." (p. 156)
As Paul' s fantasy takes on human charac-
teristics, so does Harry's conception of the river.
At the last
he is pulled by "a long gentle hand" which finally, unlike his
mother's, takes him to a new place.
b.
Jean stafford' s "The Shorn Lamb."
In Miss stafford's short story, as in Miss Porter's, the focus
is upon the unhappy situation of the parents. of the child.
The
tension in their marriage is undermining the whole family:
the
older and hardier children are becoming cruel; Hannah is sadly
retreating to a world of sleep.
For Jean Stafford, too, the mother's love is of primary importance for the young, sensitive child.
Hannah, unlike Harry, has
received this love, but its abundance and sensuality have kept her
a "baby of five years old."
She is passive and dependent.
Her
mother is able to laze about in bed gossiping and drinking tea aIl
day.
She is "woman as queen"; her bed is her throne.
object is "gelded," "soft," and "fat."
Yet this
Basically sterile, it can
produce children, of necessity, but not parental love.
is trapped in her maternaI role.
The mother
Her relationship with Rob is her
only escape, but he seems too much the jargon-ridden artist to
offer any real haven for either the mother or the child.
•
(He speaks
of himself, for example, as "the artist" in the manner of a positive force, and talks of the "lambencies" of the hair in "a state
of nature.")
His kindness to Hannah only confuses her, giving her
61
•
two very different fathers.
The other men mentioned have also little to recommend them;
they are connected to a usually Nazi militarism
Hitler.
the Gestapo,
The father is an "autocrat" whose manhood is embodied
in the phallic duelling swords on the wall.
Overwhelmed by his
wife's sensuous power, he relies on a defensive cruelty when he
does not get his own way.
He set a bad example for his children
-- lying, swearing, and enforcing ru les rather than being at aIl
loving.
It is no wonder that the quarrels and their consequences div ide
the family into "belligerent" camps and that the children often
hate their parents.
It is difficult to tell if Miss stafford means
these parents to be indicative of a larger problem of wealth and
ease.
The mother who lounges aIl day in her soft bed is somewhat
stereotyped, yet it is impossible to extend the situation in the
way we can Miss O'Connor's.
These are two mismated people pampered
by their wealth.
Hannah is bored -- her long days and her loss of a reason for
existence point to this.
And we have seen that her loss is mani-
fe~ted
in a loss of identity; she is a "rag-do1l," "the baby," and
so on.
The other children react in a similar way, although we see
1ess
evidenc~
of this.
They too are bored, and have become
estranged from their real selves.
Janie runs "like a dog," and
they, more than anyone, calI Hannah by otller names (she is a "mush-
•
room" and "a skinned catIT).
The original tit1e of the story, "Cops
and Robbers," underlines the fact that this is a general, familial
62
•
predicament.
The members of the family are "cops and robbers" of
a:ffection: not real people.
father a "weasel."
The mother is a "brood mare," and the
The people with whom the family comes in con-
tact are similarly described as Gestapo and rear admiraIs.
Even
the men in the barbershop resemble the "fat stut"fed skunk" regarding
itself in the mirror.
condition to animal
AlI manifest a degeneration from the human
behavi~r.
Miss sta:fford's child is an "originally innocent" one -- note
her dislike of lying and her perception that eavesdropping and
spying are "sins."
Mournful, loving, and good, her personality
heightens the pathos of her mother's neglect.
The long-drawn-out
melancholy of the child places this story in the romantic tradition; Hannah is a modern Little Nell.
Complications of her
"decline" are kept at a minimum or lost in the directness of Miss
sta:ffordJs focus upon the pathos of the situation.
We see more of
Hannah's thought processes than we do Harry's; so little of his
"suicide" is explained.
Here, both direct connections such as
those between "anti-man" and "ottoman" and the subtleties of love
and the feelings of rejection are explained, if not deeply explored.
c.
Katherine AnD Porter' s "The Downward Path to Wisdom."
"The Downward Path to Wisdom" marks a point of transition
between the purely romantic story of the pathetic child and the
psychologically oriented short story.
.'
It is not so carefully
subjective as Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," however, for
Miss Porter's aim is different.' stephen is neither a potential
63
•
artist nora schizophrenie.
He is a young child, Îour years old,l
with a limited comprehension of what goes on about him; to see the
world through his eyes requires discipline and perception.
most part Miss Porter succeeds.
For the
Sae lapses once into a glimpse of
Frances' mind and she does comment upon Stephen occasionally, but
in general she restricts her perceptions and vocabulary to those
of a four-year-old.
The effort that one senses, however, gives
the story a sense of psychological falsification which l shall
examine more closely in the chapter on "the psychological short
story."
For the present l shall restrict my remarks to the theme
of "disorder" in the story.
Like Hannah, Stephen is being
order in his parents.
Maisie was unwanted.
intim::~tely
affected by the dis-
He is unwanted in the way that James's
His only value for other Îamily members is
as a tool for retaliation upon still other members.
Both parents
are childish: the father cruel and thoughtless in his treatment oÎ
stephen; the mother quick to exploit any emotion.
her tantrums and he compares them with his own:
Stephen has seen
"His mother's voiee.
rose in a terrible scream, screaming something he could not understand, but she was furious; he has seen her clenching her fists and
stamping in one spot, screaming with her eyes shut; he knew how she
looked." (p. 85)
Her behavior denotes theatricality, for at the
story's end she gives a tense, rehearsed speech in a storm of anger
.
-
1 Katherine Ann Porter. "The Downward Path to Wisdom," The
Leaning Tower And Other Stories (New York, 1944), p. 81 •
Subsequent references will be to this edition. This short story
was originally collected in this volume.
64
•
which "b10ws over" 1ike a sudden raine
Her mother's words, "1 hope
you'll be feeling better," indicate that this has happened before.
The connection between Stephen's tantrums and his
mother~s
is
more meaningfu1 than that between the "dec1ines" of Hannah and her
mother.
If the grandmother's reaction to her chi1dren's quarre1
can be taken as any indication of her conduct when they were young,
we can understand their natures in terms of her own.
primari1y se1fish:
of your quarreling.
either of you.
this noise.
"Go home, daughter.
Go away, David.
l've never had a day's
l'm sick of you both.
Go away." (pp. 108-109)
She too is
peac~
l'm sick
or comfort from
Now let me alone and stop
The grandmother too can be
dramatically pathetic one minute and "cheerful" the next.
If our
small glimpses of her are meant to reveal her character in this
way, the story adds another generation to this pattern of family
disorder.
Lack of self-control and thoughtfulness has created a formula
of negative expectation.
Uncle David says, "1 shouldn't expect too
much of him" and "it's in the b100d."
"WeIl, just as l thought,
Old Janet, too, remarks,
• Just as l expected." (p. 103)
As
the children are not expected to be moral, so their offspring are
not presumed to be so.
The fights between Stephen's parents indi-
cate their lack of decision over his discipline.
He has a vague
and sometimes inexact apprehension of right and wrong.
Thus he
feels guilty about taking the teapot and hides -- but he takes it
•
anyway.
Somewhere he has learned the evil of stealing -- perhaps
where he learned "Name father son holygoat."
Neither the permissive
65
•
mother who babies Stephen and gives him pet names as Hannah's
mother did nor the ridiculously moral uncle have the right moral
view.
The child, between two opposing Ïorces, suÏÏers the pain
oÏ being discussed.
Miss Porter has portrayed Stephen as an
extremely sensitive barometer of feeling.
sudden shifts in the moods of others.
He reacts swiftly to
Perhaps through his school
experiences he is less spineless at the short story's end.
this point ·"he is able to reject aIl his home and Ïamily.
At
Like
Harry, in a world with no standards he evolves his own absolutes.
d.
Summary.
The authors of these thxee short stories, then aIl view the
child as an impressionable being whose balance can be easily
destroyed by the forces of unevenness around him.
At the mercy
of every breeze that blows, these three children ultimately reject
this inconstant atmosphere.
Whether disorders are marital, relig-
ious, or authoritarian, the child's consciousness registers them
and reacts accordingly.
Event5 which seem minis cule to the adult
are large Ïor him.
Unlike the boys of traditional American fiction, these three
children are not resilient.
perhaps they are too young and
untrained to be able to stand up to the oblivious adult world which
surrounds them.
Their only solution is withdrawal, and aIl, Harry
joyÏully, Hannah sadly, and Stephen desperately, cast off aIl that
•
is Ïamiliar to them.
Yet the three authors show, through their
respective treatments of the same general theme, a marked difÏerence
66
•
in objecte
child.
In the last story we see the final view of the romantic
Stephen's withdrawal, unlike Hannah's, is analytically
viewed; we see exactly his reasons for his sensations in his
surroundings and we get a description of them.
Only at the end
does Miss Porter allow the pathos or the other two staries.
When
Stephen's head accidently cames to rest on his mother's knee, the
tale is given an ironie and melancholy twist •
•
67
•
Part B.
The New Interest in the Psychology of the Child.
Chapter VI.
Introduction:
Freudianism and the Child.
In the chapters of Part A l have stressed the continuation ùf
the romantic tradition in the portrayals of the child.
The
analysis of the stories in this second part of my thesis does not
discuss an interest which opposes this tradition but explores its
new aspect which involves a scientific investigation of the child's
consciousness.
In general the basic concern of the story remains
a sentimental one; in nearly aIl the stories considered the native
sensitivity of the child is contrasted to adult vulgarity, stupi=
dit y, and callousness.
Only in Peter Taylor's "A Spinste:r's Tale"
and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" are the viewpoints
of the characters so warped that the tensions which arise bear
little relationship to those between the child's and the adult's
views of the world.
In the former tale it is the contrast between
the male and the female which fascinates Betsy, while in Aiken's
short story it is the insensitivity of those who do not comprehend
his psychotic fantasy which angers Paul.
In both stories these
1
contrasts are so distorted by the child~n:inds that they are
forces only within their respective tales.
For the other stories l am considering the study of the child's
.....,'" ;c..h
mentality~exists
in conjunction with the concept of the worth of
his perceptions and the pathos of their destruction.
•
Perhaps it
is more exact to say that, aIl too often, the interest in psychology
which leads the author to attempt the explication of the child-mind
;'
68
•
through an internaI monologue style and such significant details
as dreams is grafted on to the sentimentality l have noted in the
~hapters
above.
Miss Porter's short
st~ry
is the most obvious
example of this technique which l discuss at greater length in
relation to her story.
For the writers of the chapter on the
writer as a child, psychology has been of benefit in the explanation (and sometimes the glamorization) of their craft.
This new interest in the psychology
of the child in short
fiction has arisen since the growth of the sciences, particularly
psychology, at the end of the last century and their popularization during our own time.
Probably the Theory of Recapitulation
formulated by Darwin, which compares the life of individuals to
the agas of history, was of greatest effect in returning the image
of the child to its place in the continuity of a lifetime,l but
Freud's theories of infantile sexuality are of similar importance.
Both removed the concept of the child from emulation by the adult
world as successfully as did the recurring theories of "the for tunate fall" which have always run counter to romantic interest in
the primitive mind.
Put in its place
eRee~
(for, in terms of
specifically literary works, Wordsworth's The Prelude contains the
kernel of the organic view of childhood), youth could once more be
of valid interest.
In an age of persons who had wept over their
lost childhood during the performances of Peter Pan this return to
the notion of the child as "father of the man" was a noticeable
•
change •
IBoas, p. 61.
69
•
A statement such as "the very impressions which we have forgotten /In the amnesia which hides our childhoodl have nevertheless
left the deepest traces in our psychic lite, and acted as determin2
ants for our whole future development," which has revolutionized
child care and education, has also great fictional potential.
The
long, flexible novel form could trace the evolution of the personality through an entire lifetime.
Biographies and such fiction
works as Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage make use of this concept.
The short story could play with the analysis of one specifie event
and intimations of its influence upon future behavior.
The majority
of tales which concern children -- most of these studied in this
thesis, Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg," and Dylan Thomas'
of
~hildhood,~to
~tories
name only a few -- make use of this idea to a
greater or lesser extent.
Although l would stress this emphasis on childhood as a valid
aspect of human development as Freud's contribution to child-study,
Peter Coveney places importance on the tact that, in this new
factual approach, the child is freed from concepts of both original
sin and original innocence. 3
Freud's business-like examination of ~
sexuality in young children and his daughter's consideration of
lines of development and the relationship between the child and the
adult, which blast the concept ,of "original innocence" for the
••
2 Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex,
transe A.A. Brill, Third Revised Edition (New York and
Washington, 1918), p. 38.
3 Coveney, pp. 291-292 •
70
•
orthodox, have had a great effect.
As Frederick J. Hoffman puts
it, they "threatened to disabuse us of one of our strongest sentiments
the 'ange1' theory of chi1dhood.,,4
these theories have
becom~
Yet, during our century,
subsumed in factua1, secu1ar know1edge.
The discoveries of sexua1ity and aggression in chi1dren no longer
a1arm us as indications of the evil nature of natural man.
The
tradition of the romantic chi1d has been able to survive without
having to admit these phenomena as evidence of inherent sin.
The most immediate and well-explicated effect or the theories
or Freud and psycho1ogists such as Jung and Adler was upon writing
style.
The influence or his "rree association" method of psycho-
ana1ysis upon the practitioners or what William James has called
the "stream of consciousness" writing style has been studied by
Leon Ede1 in The Psycho10gical Novel 1900-1950 and Frederick J.
Hoffman in Freudianism and the
~iterary
Mind.
Freud's studies of
dream interpretation, repression, and displacement have added new
areas ror fictional exploration for various authors and become part
or what Houston Peterson terms the Ifmania psychologica" which
àominated the first rew decades of the century.
James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Faulkner, Conrad Aiken, and
Sherwood Anderson were only a few or the authors who used the
new principles of psychology in their work.
•
4 Frederick J. Hofrman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind,
Second Edition (AnD Arbor, Michigan, 1967), p. 14 •
71
•
As a result o:f the "discovery o:f the unconscious," attention
began to be given to the child not only because it is in childhood
that patterns o:f unconscious association are :formed, but also
because it is in the child that the :forces of motivation are least
complex.
Involved thought processes have not yet been :formed.
A
short past and :fewer experiences make behavior less complicated
than in the adult, so that the components o:f
~he
childfs mind can,
at least in theory, be separated and analyzed in :fictional form
with more ease than those o:f the adult mind.
The most enjoyable
experiment with this concept is the opening section o:f Joyces's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of 1914; baby tuckoo,
Dante, heat, damp, smell and song are aIl 1inked in a pattern of
association which might exist within the mind o:f a small boy.
Original as the style was at the time the book was written, the
conception o:f the story had its :forerunner in a book published in
1897, Henry James's What Maisie Knew.
The fact o:f the child's
point of view, as James explained in his pre:face, was a necessity
as a :factor in the "germ" o:f the conceived plot, not as an uncomp1ex medium :for viewing the story, yet the mind of the little girl,
which James does consider a restriction, a "limited consciousness,"
does serve the purpose.
Given an extreme "sensibilityll and IIfresh-
ness," it has the capacity :for expansion during the course of the
book.
.'
Mamsie remains able "to resist. • • the strain o:f observation
and the assaul t o:f experience;'S but she dE:f:tni tel y begins at one
level of childish :fears and illusions and matures to a more realistic
5 Henry James, What Maisie Knew (New York, 19G8), p. xi.
72
•
one.
The "moral decision" at the end, however, is a :farcical one,
:for Maisie has no conception o:f the ethics involved.
She is in
nearly aIl senses a "romantic child": her thought processes, as
Beach has pointed out, are those o:f a child;6 as the "ironie
center" she comments on the adult situation; she is able to
"intuit" true morality.
Yet Maisie's portrayal is a technical attempt to probe a child's
mind and its comprehension of a situation, and it is :for this reason
that l include it here.
In his descent into the inner mind James
was before his time, but his inbred and allusive style restricts
him from entering his young creation's consciousness as other
authors (such as Conrad Aiken and James Joyce) have done.
Perhaps
it is un:fair to judge James on this scale, :for the book is, in
Beach's words, a fltechnical excess" in quite another category.
The preface states di:fferent intentions.
An objective view of
l\iaisie, an overly contrived plot, a strict moral sense, and a
relatively "straight" use of the third-person narrative separate
it from later experiments in the forme
Such attempts to find in an individual child., man, or even
animal a microcosm o:f the essential individual or society have
been popular in our century.
One outstanding study dealing with
children should be mentioned, William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
In concentrating on the dissolution o:f a group of boys alone upon
an island as a metaphor for the human condition upon the earth,
•
6 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method o:f Henry James
(Philadelphia, Penn., 1954), p. 239.
73
•
Golding has shown the workings o:f a sort o:f "original sin" as
a destroyer o:f civilization.
The "extreme case" o:f seeing the
:faults o:f society in a group o:f children to explore the truth
is part o:f a traditional search :for the discovery o:f the common
and universal characteristics o:f mankind.
It takes its place
with the use o:f a :future "utopia" in George Orwell's
~
and
Aldous HuxleylBrave New World and Orwell's use o:f animaIs in
Animal Farm •
•
74
•
Chapter VI l •
The Wr i ter as a Clild:
Truman Capote' s "A
Christmas Memory," Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow,
Secret Snow," and Eudora Welty's liA Memory.1I
The exploration of the youth of an artist as a method of gaining
insight into the nature of the creative person has a tradition with
several "high points" in British literature worth mentioning here.
Unlike the "cult of the child" literature, such investigations
typically stress the organic nature of human development.
AlI
events are relevant, although some have a greater effect upon
the child than others, and aIl contribute in some way to the growing
pers on as weIl as to his purely aesthetic perceptions.
Such studies
explore both the innate characteristics cf the particular child and
those contributed by his environment.
Wordsworth recounts his
childhood and youth in this very unsentimental way in The Prelude.
The continuous contribution of his surroundings to his mature
phil os ophy, morality, and peetry is the controlling theme of his
conscientious scrutiny into his pasto
"The chi Id is father of the
man" -- an obvious statement, perhaps, but one which has seldom
been emphasized as it was to be later in the nineteenth century
and in our own time.
In The Prelude importance is attached, as
it is in Rousseau's Confessions, perhaps the most frankly egoistic
work in this genre, to relatively small events, such as the "act
of stealth/ And troubled pleasure"l resulting in an evening row
•
upon the lake.
The concept that these occurrences do shape the
1 Wordsworth, p. 499.
75
•
later char acter and that they should be examined in context is
Wordsworth's major contribution to the child's history in English
literature.
His description or the "rair seed-time" or his soul
is an attempt to discover just what goes into the making of a poet.
As a psychological study, it is an early echo of what came to be
a more technical inquiry into the makeup or the child's mimd at
the beginning or the next century.
His stress upon the chi1d as
"father of the artist" is important for our time, but his statement that Uthe chi1d is father of the man'" is in some way the
basis for nearly aIl the modern short stories that rocus upon the
chi1d.
VJith the new interest in psychology, concern ror the artistic.
child took on a new analytic character.
Factors in heredity and
environment which produce a ,creative child began to be examined.
Boas has pointed out that even many later nineteenth-century
writings such as James Sully's Studies of Childhood (1895) connect
the aesthetic sensibilities of the child and the artist as a
matter of course~ and the results of such investigations had their
effect upon speciric aspects of the artistic children depicted in
fiction.
The foundation for the movement still lies in The Prelude,
with Wordsworth's recognition of his own earliest sensibilities, but
now the movement broadens not only to "the existing artist as child"
but also to the non ... autobiographical studyor "the child as artist."
It is perhaps a truism to say that every literary character subjec ...
•
tively examined is in some way autobiographical.
Zaoas, p. 83.
Some "child as
76
•
artist" writings are stated personal remembrances, but others are
drawn only
partially from the author's experience.
Of the stories
l am considering in this chapter, only one, Conrad Aiken's "Silent
Snow, Secret Snow, Il seems a technical, non-personal examination of
a sensitive child.
James: Joyce's own A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is
the most obvious work in this forme
The importance placed upon
sensation, the emphasis upon lyric rhythm in song, the changing
of reality to something slightly different in a creative manner
("The green wothe botheth"), an early concern with language and
definition of words and situations, and an ease of association
can aIl be noted in the first page and a half as specifically
aesthetic apprehensions.
The extension of unconscious associa-
tion and patterns of imagery throughout the novel make this the
most deliberately "organic" of aIl these works.
An autobiographical perspective such as this is,of course,
subject to self-flattering
dist~ion
process of selection of episode.
above the normally warping
The subjective nature of Joyce's
Portrait makes such egoism more difficult to catch in his novel
than the personal indulgence of Dylan Thomas' comparable Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940).
The reader can easily tire
of Thomas' penchant for seeing himself as "small, thin, indecisively
active, quick to get dirty, curly,"
perceptive and sensitive childhood.
•
3
living a normal yet extremely
One can scarcely find a boy
3Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
(New York, 1940), p. 68.
77
•
between the picturesque representation or the two polarities or
swagger and imagination.
The reminiscing author betrays his
presence in the conception and phrasing or such stories as "The
Fight."
Although the three stories l shall deal with here vary in the
extent to which the y are autobiographical, aIl three writers have
portrayed their children as unusual in ways which underline their
awareness and creativity.
AlI continue the tradition_or the
exploration or the artistic tempe~ent through an explication of
facets of their own natures.
a.
Truman capote's "A Christmas Memory"
"Buddy," of "A Christmas Memory," is a sensually alert child.
The "Caarackle" of walnuts, the smell of the "ocean" from a pinetree patch or the odor or baldng rruit-cakes, the touch of smooth
nickles and a tugging kite, and the taste of whiskey are aIl
recorded, although they take second place to the Many sights
the country setting.
o~
These are imaginatively depicted: "The
kitchen is growing dark.
Dusk turns the window into a mirror:
our rerlections mingle with the rising Moon as we work by the
fireside in the rirelight," (p. 116) and "a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish-gay naked light bulbs
and standing by the river's muddy edge under the shade of river
trees where MOSS drifts through the branches like gray mist." (p.IIS)
•
Perhaps it is the diction, however, that is the Most striking •
Capote loves the shape and texture or words.
He often records them,
78
•
as has been noted in the "memory" chapter, in the manner of
children's lists which take on the character of rhythmic chants.
Here, for example, is a list of groceries to buy:
"Cherries and
citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds
and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and • • • • " (p. 116)
His
attention to alliteration, assonance and cadence produces a
peculiarly chiming, lilting record of common articles.
Although
this pattern of recording is the older author's, the magic of the
words is remembered.
The colleciiou of coins shows a similar
preoccupation, as does the list of Christmas tree decorations,
"coils of frazzled tinsel gone gold with age, one silver star,
a brief rope of dilapidated, undoubtedly dangerous candy-like
light bulbs." (p. 123)
As important as the diction are the Many metaphors and similes.
Capote consistently gives the objects he describes a fOlksy slant
by comparing them with objects even more "natural," a device often
used by the "nostalgie" writer.
Thus the iron stove "g10ws like a
lighted pumpkin," the paper kites twitch "at the string like skyfish as they swim into a wind," and dollar bills are as "tightly
rolled and green as May buds."
escape such .analogy:
Even people's emotions do not
Buddy feels "warm and sparky as those
crumbling logs, carefree as the wind in the chimney. l'
These have'
the effect of creating in Buddy, even though he, at the age of
seven at least, is not the narrator, a kind of child of nature •
•
Such
r~cording
of sensations (although these are chiefly pleasant
ones, it should be noted) and concern with words, metaphors,and
79
•
similes seem to be his, even if obviously polished by the older
narrator.
This lyric depiction of a poetica11y alive boyhood close to
nature is tradi tional.
Like the 'Wordsworthian child, Buddy has
no restrictions on the perceptions of his eyes, ears and touch.
The preoccupation with appropriate words and lists are purported
to be "Buddy's" :first attempts to structure observations and to
describe them.
Yet somehow the effect is too calculated.
One
fee1s that this is Capote fashioning the boyhood of a writer by
the simple device or transferring accomp1ished technique from
his own writing to
b.
that of an ideal youth.
Conrad l\Ïken' s "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
Paul, of Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, secret Snow!," is also
sensitive to the nature around him, but purely sensory data and
the words to describe and compare them are only part of what makes
Paul a special child.
Aikents story is carefully modulated; we
first see Paul as a relatively normal boy in a normal setting.
It
is not until he slides deeper into his snow world that the contrast
between it and his home and parents becomes alI-important.
!Yluch
critical ef:fort has been expended in construing the story as the
withdrawal of a schizophrenie into his world of fantasy, but there
is reason to believe the'it Paul is also m.:ant in sorne way as an
extraordinary child, a gifted creative spirit.
•
This view has its
chief advocate in Ann Grossman, who has explicated the reading from
Sophocles and the final cold seed image in terms of artistic expression in the 1964 Studies in Short Fiction.
80
•
From the first lines of the story Paul is set apart by his
partial understanding of what is happening to him, his sight, his
analogies, and his vocabulary.
And these, Aiken has deftly given
us to believe, are not his own (Aiken's) but those of the boy.
The author's viewpoint is completely, almost uncannily submerged
in Paul, even though the
s~ory
remains in the third person.
From
Paul's first simile comparing his "secret" to "a particularly
beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser pocket,"
it is through Paul that we are viewing events.
There is, for example, the walk homeward, in which each detail
is carefully recorded -- twigs, an advertisement, dog tracks, a
birdhouse, a stenciled "H."
But these material observations
ultimately take second place for Paul.
things.
fvliracles.
"There were more important
Beyond the thoughts of trees, mere elms ••
Beyond the thoughts ev en of his shoes.,,4
..
He is already going
xurther than the natural fact to what~ever principle may lie behind
it.
One wonders what kind of "creator" Paul would become.
He
has not the lyric interest in words and their combinat ions to be
a poet in the sense that capote would have it, of stylistic worth
rather than content.
He would become a more profound and philo-
sophie artist or author.
paul's graduaI withdrawal from everyday life into his snowworld signi:fies a rejection of a world which becomes increasingly
4Conrad Aiken, "Si1ent Snow, Secret Snow," Among the Lost People
(New York, 1934), pp. 141-142.' Subsequent references will be to
this edition, in v/hich this story was f"irst collected.
81
distasteful.
Examining the list of observed details during the
afternoon walk one finds that they are predominantly ugly:
Branches are IIvery thin and fine and black and dessicated."
"Dirty sparrows" huddle "in the bushes, as dull in color as deac1
:fruit left in leaÎless trees."
the gutter.
"A li ttle deI ta of fil th': lies in
These revelations of the world's hideousness show no
evidence of a vision of fleurs
~~,
of acceptance
~nd
under-
standing to the point where there is a perception of real beauty.
If Paul's withdrawal is at aIl an aesthetic one, it is the ivorytower retreat of one who cannot make his peace with reality.
His
contrasting fantasy-world is aIl too beautiful and pure: IIIts
beauty was paralyzing -- beyond aIl words, aIl experience, aIl
dreams.
No fairy story he had ever read could be compared with
it -- none had ever given him this • • • ethereal loveliness. • ••
(p. 144)
The contrast of reality and illusion becomes more striking
as the story progresses through IIthe inquisition":
his father's
tone changes to IIthe familiar voice of silken warning,1I then ta
IIthe well-knawn 'punishment' voice, resanant and cruel. 1I
Their
investigation places him on a "brilliantly lighted stage, under a
great round blaze of spotlight," like a IItraineù seal, or a performing dog. 1I (pp. 149-150) The snow-dream beconles more involuntary,
more desirable, more beautiful
and more human.
At the last it
lifts "long v.hite arms," "puts on its manners,1I whispers and laughs.
rt
r;oes "take the place of everything" in the material world and,
Li.ncüly, the place of the parents themselves.
Attempts to I!inquisi-
tion" Paul, ta talk hin; out of his clream, are what amounts ta attempts
82
•
to cure the artist of his imaginative fantasy.S
The passage which Paul reads to the doctor has been identified
by Ann Grossman as a choral ode from Oedipus
~
Colonus.
She finds
evidence that the passage links Paul and oedipus as persons "tragically isolated and wrongly
condemned by society," artists for whom
the forthcoming death (or in Paul's case the cessation of consciousness) is an apotheosis. 6
For myself, however, the reference to
Sophocles' Oedipus seems obscure.
Aiken carefully chose the passage,
l would suggest, for its elaborately poetic
image~which
are ironi-
cally absurd,read during the "inquisition" of a potential artist or
poet as a test of his eyesight.
Most of aIl it is the vision of the snow which Paul's subconsciousness has chosen which marks his creative bent.
with aIl its
associations of co Id and whiteness, the snow is perfectly adapted
for a symbol of "peace," "remoteness," (of "the polar regions"),
"cold," and "sleep."
The reconciliation of opposites embodied in
the phrases "white darkness" and "a little co Id seed" applied to
his secret fantasy and the fact that it is described as at once
unbelievabl.1 lovely and "deliciously terrifying" indicate that
Paul is going beyond the life he sees to the infinite, in terms
of what he knows.
Like Teddy, he is searching, in his cessation
of normal existence, for the ultimate
death.
•
eÀ~erience
of life which is
His snow-fantasy is also something he is able to love with
SAnn Grossman, u'Silent Sno\'1, Secret Snow': The Child as Artist,"
Studies in Short Fiction, l (1964), 126 •
6Grossman, p. 127.
L
83
•
aIl his being, as "He loved it -- he stood still and loved it"
indicates.
That the white Îlakes become a protecting Îemale Îorm
which supplants his bateÎul mother suggests his childish conception
oÎ
love.
He "dies" into himselÎ to become an embryo ready to begin
liÎe again in a more ideal atmosphere.
Aside Îrom this poetic aptness oÎ the cold seed image, this
Îantasy is consistent1y seen as a choice oÎ the beautiÎul.
The
Îirst intimation oÎ the snow in the bedroom brings the thought:
"How love1y! • • • the long white ragged lines were driÎting and
siÎting across the street, across the Îaces oÎ the old houses,
whispering and hushing, making little triangles oÎ white in the
corners between cobblestones, • • • t! (p. 132) The initial perception is oÎ sight, of beauty, the second is oÎ sound --
th~
snow
was "getting deeper and àeeper and silenter and silenter."
a Îew exceptions and some synesthetic
ble~ding
with
such as seeing
through an "accompaniment, or counterpaint" oÎ snow, this pattern
continues throughout the story, pointing to the Îact that there is
initially a choice of the artistically pleasing and pure over the
congealed sawàust and the advertisement for ECZEMA ointment.
Only
then is the necessary muffling oÎ actuality which the deadening
quality oÎ the snow symbolizes a part oÎ his illusion.
"Silent
Snow, Secret Snow" is best interpreted as the withdrawal oÎ a
sensitive child from a cumbersome reality.
l think we need not
see it as the typical retreat of the artist-personality but instead
•
consider it as the retreat of the artistic quality in each child as
84
•
the Ïirst and primary line oÏ the withdrawal Ïrom adult reality.
c.
Eudora Welty's "A Memory"
The child oÏ Eudora Welty's "A Memory" is engaged in a very
necessary activity, that oÏ observing liÏe around her and attempting
to discover in it some pattern oÏ order.
Ïorms judgments.
She draws conclusions and
When Ïorthcoming observations do not then conform
to her expectations she is "Ïrightened" by "a vision oÏ abandonment
and wildness which /tears at her/ heart with a kind oÏ sorrow."
(p. 144)
Small observations take on huge signiÏicance, becoming
indicative oÏ larger rules oÏ organization.
So Ïar this is normal
behavior, but this child orders her percepticns in a peculiar way,
through the act oÏ "Ïraming" them with her Ïingers.
"Ever since !She/ had begun taking painting lessons," Miss Welty
tells us, she has been viewing things
th~Q~gh
such Ïrames, and the
world she views through this device seems to her a "projection" oÏ
herself.
Nearly every observation seems to reveal to her lia
secret o:f life 7 " an intimation both of what is within herself and
also "projected' ! into the outer world she then observes.
Any art
work, \'l1hether a poem, a sculpture, or a framed painting, is in some
way an imposition of arder upon the chaos oÏ existence, the solidification oÏ some perception of an instant.
The frame oÏ a landscape
or still life roay be the most sim~stic boundary possible, and it
may be the inorganic pressure of an external border rather than
•
internal structure, but it is one means oÏ Ïorming a control oÏ
such chaos.
It seems that this "Ïraming" device is a distinctly
85
•
aesthetic notion.
When the child of this short story creates a
"painting" inside her frame of fingers,she is attempting to capture
some significant forme
Artistic perfection here is not seen as
the utterance of an earthshaking moral or intellectual message or
even the depiction of some insight.
Rather, it is the achievement
of a pleasing and meaningful pattern, an arrangement of objects
pleasing to the eye.
As the boy Joyce creates poetry by the forming
of words, so this child plays with picturing objects with her
"frame."
The narrator has told us that when events occurred which did
not "comorm" to her ideal she was terrified.
And her relation
of the classroom incident is an example of the way in which her
expectations are disappointed.
If there is one certainty of child-
hood it is that fantasies of beauty and the ideal will be disproven;
i f there is one certainty of the artist it is that attempts to
achieve ultimate perfection will fail.
This is the link between
this initiation of the child into adulthood and the perception of
the artist, always fresh, that he will never have the ultimate
"say," that reality will constantly surprise him and alter even
the basic premises of his beliefs.
The short story here, then, recounts another instance of what
occurs when the narrator's imposition of a "perfect" and static
pattern is broken.
The bathers appear without benefit of the "frame"
device and she is unable to incorporate them in any pattern.
•
She
can only perform her function as an observer; the sound she
"identifies" as a laugh, she "begins to comprehend" the structure
86
•
of their communication as "a progression, a circle of answers."
(p. 149)
Like Paul's observation of details on his homeward walk,
this section of the story is a small masterpiece of slanted writing.
Seldom does the narrator definitely state the fact of the group's
ugliness, yet the clever use of adjectives and analogies have the
cumulative effect of real disgust.
In the aimless, awkward stupidity and lack of self-respect of
the bathers the narrator finds a microcosm of the human condition
which shatters her ide al.
Her fantasy, "the undefined austerity
of /her/ love." has been a protection from such horror.
In observing
"everything /the boyï did, trying to learn and translate and verify,"
her vision and her ideal have not been incompatible.
Her illusion
contains the story's only image of beauty, the rose which "blossoms
at will" and carries an odor of sweetness, and is associated with
soothing, protecting darkness; it is, at the end, identified with
the "small worn white pavilion," battered, but intact.
ethereal nature of her love excludes aIl sensuality.
The
Even the
"minute and brief encounter" on the stairs is "endured" and the
sight of the child's blood, which makes her faint, must have been
a revelation similar to the one she describes here.
Her love is
the essence, the ideal quantity which remains when aIl the superficialities of knowledge, sexuality, and even respect -- his face,
for example, carries a look of "stupidity" -- have been lost.
The
girl here cries in a burst of pit Y for what she recognizes as a
•
pathetic, yet enduring ideal.
She continues ta frame her observa-
tions, and this is important.
From this it seems that Miss Welty
87
.,.
considers this disillusionment as one of Many which occur in the
time of childhood or the life of the artist which serve to shape
his perceptions.
The focus of her attention is upon the point of
impact of the inexperienced ideal and the world.
d.
Summary.
The traditional examination of the nature of the artist through
his childhood has its origins, as l have pointed out in my introduction to this chapter, in a writer usually considered highly
"romantic," Wordsworth.
l place this chapter in the section of
my thesis which considers the "psychological" aspect of these
short stories because it seems to me to involve a more analytical
approach to the nature of the chi Id than purely fictional interests.
The careful "planting" of details which tell of a particularly
creative vision of the world is an indication of interest in just
~
characteristics are integral to the makeup of the artiste
probably because they realize that extensive analysis of this type
would destroy the value of their stories, none of these three
authors bring technical details to the attention of the reader.
The
stories of Capote and welty are "memories," but whether the latter
is truly a memory or merely"written within the "memory" genre, as
is Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," is uncertain.
We are never
sure if Paul is meant to be definitely an artistic child: is it a
sane Paul who constructs this lovely snow fantasy, or is its beauty
•
only chance?
Thus in aIl three stories there is uncertainty.
Is
this the adult writer when he was young or is this an attempt to
88
•
link "the child" and "the artist" in a more general way?
Capoteis chi Id is the most sensually oriented, tèe most
romantically conceived.
In his portrayal
th~re
is an obvious
attempt at the depiction of an artistically perceptive childfather.
He is close to nature and its beauty leads him to find
words and phrases :for its description.
"Buddy" (or the older
Capote) is the natural, spontaneous poet.
Conrad Aiken's Paul is marked as a youthful artist or author
by the nature of his snow fantasy.
An abnormally sensitive boy,
he rejects the prosaic place he has found his world to be for the
elaborately beautiful dream.
80th paul's specifie vision and that
of Eudora Welty in UA Memory" are "romantic" in their tendency to
polarize the child and adult worlds.
For both there is a vital
link between the ideal, described in terms which connect it to
qualities of aesthetic love, the nature of love, and the child.
Both children choose to remain within their dreams of the perfection of aIl values, but Miss \velty's child is able to reconcile
her new concepts with her dream in some way.
For both Paul and
her elaboration of the ideal is in some way essential.
They are
the dreamers who can mold experience into an ideal more tangible
than the world about them.
"children?"
Neither Aiken nor Welty limits the story by being
exact on this point •
•
But are they "artist-children" or
89
••
Chapter VIII.
The Psychological Short Story:
Katherine
Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom,"
Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," and
Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
"The psychological short story is a genre by itself, and its
practitioners include Sherwood Anderson, Peter Taylor, and Conrad
Aiken.
It is not surprising that many such stories are written
from a child's point of view.
Much of modern psychology underlines
the importance of childhood events in shaping the character of the
older adult, as l have emphasized in my introduction to this section
of n>y thesis.
Novels \'!hich follow a character through an extended
length of time, such as Joyce's Portrait, can study a complex of
interrelated events and their consequences, but the short story
rocuses upon one such occurrence and gives it in such psychologically pertinent detail that the development of the personality is
implied.
An obvious example from a familiar short story will
illustrate my point.
Eudora Welty's narrator of "A Memory" says,
after recounting the time when the boy she loved had a nosebleed
and she fainted, "Does this explain why, ever since that day, l
have been unable to bear the sight of blood?" (p. 295)
of course, must be a resounding "Yes."
The answer,
And there we have a complete
incident, secure in its significance for the adult life.
.'
A note should be added on the style of these stories.
Leon Edel,
whose critical work The Psychological Novel 1900-1950 gives my
chapter its title, has analyzed the various r.omponents of such novels.
90
•
Both he and Frederick J. Hoffman consider works such as Joyce's
Portrait experiments closely linked ta psychalagical studies in
their use of the internaI monologue.
This form has been adapted
by Katherine Ann Porter and Conrad Aiken, although Miss Porter's
use of it in "The Downward Path to Wisdom" can be cansidered only
fragmentary.
l wish to make it clear that in speaking of "the
psychological short story".;l l am referring both in content and ta
method of presentation.
a.
Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom."
The bulk o:f Miss Porter's work does not show su<:"h an involved
concern with technical introspection c)f character as "The Downward
Path to Wisdom.!I
manner.
Stephen is viewed in a particularly subjective
The story begins with a definite restriction of conscious-
ness to his four-year-old mind.
Even the sentence structure,
diction, and phrasing are the child's own, as these paragraphs
from the text will illustrate:
The little boy had to pass his father on the way to the door.
He shrank into himself when he saw the big hand raised above him.
"Yes, get out of here and stay out," said Papa, giving him a
little shove toward the door. It l'las not a hard shove, but it
hurt the little boy. He slunk out, and trotted down the hall
trying not to look back. He was afraid something was coming
after him, he could not imagine what. Something hurt him aIl
over, he did not know why.
..
He did not want his breakfast; he would not have it. He sat
and stirred it round in the yellow bowl, letting it stream off
the spoon and spill on the table, on his front, on the chair.
He liked seeing it spill. It was hateful stuff, but it looked
funny running in white rivulets down his pajamas. (p. 83)
Although the narrator is clearly not the child and the factual
sentences are intact, this is a simplified attempt ta catch the
91
progression or thoughts in a small child's mind.
As the story
continues such moments recur, but they become interspersed with
derinite recourses to Miss Porter's own words, such as her sentence
about Stephen, "This was the rirst real dismay or his whole lire,
and he aged at least a year in the next minute, huddled, with his
deep serious blue eyes rocused down his nose in intense speculation." (p. 100)
William L. Nance has theorized that this short story, both in
title and content, contains the germ or Miss Porter's rejection
theme, a concept which he rinds basic to aIl her stories. l
The
ract that this short story, written partially rrom a child's point
or view, contains a summary or the author's work may point to the
reason ror its existence.
In a small child we may see psychological
mechanisms clearly, with few complications of conflicting rorces.
Stephen's mind thus becomes a prototype for others of Miss Porter's
characters.
When he is sick hearing his mother's tantrum and when
he cries after hearing Uncle David scold him, we see how he feels.
The events or the entire story obviate the necessity for the "quiet,
inside," "comfortable, sleepy" song at the story's end.
As l have noted in the chapter on "disorder," the pattern of
emotional instability in this story is shown to be a cumulative
one, descending from the grandmother, to the mother, to the child.
.
As "Old Janet" says, "It certainly is bad, • • • aIl this upset aIl
1 William L. Nance, S. M., Katherine Ann Porter and the Art
or Rejection (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1964), p. 7 •
'
92
•
the time and him such a baby." (p. 87)
She fails to connect the
two, but the story clearly demonstrates that it is Miss Porter's
belief that such unrest is the cause of Stephen's immaturity.
In
her probing of his mind as he experiences fears, uneasiness, and
moments of triumph, we see simple cause-and-effect relationships.
It is hard to believe, at certain points, that Miss Porter has not
been reading Freud.
Stephen's vomiting is a type of rejectionj
the paragraph about his concern over "a little end of him fl which
shows through a slit in his trousers shows an awareness of other
aspects of Freudian psychology.
It may be a criticism of his
theories of infantile sexuality, for Stephen never connects his
"little end of him" with anything sensuous and masturbation seems
to be only Janet's idea.
But l think it is more likely that Miss
Porter means to show the harmful inhibitions that a little boy can
acquire through handling by ignorant people, an aspect of sexuality
also stressed by Freud.
inside his clothes there was something bad the matter with
fi • • •
him.
His suspicions are put in his own terms:
It worried him and confused him and he wondered about it.
The only people who never seemed to notice there was something wrong
with him were Mommanpoppa.
(p. 92)
They never called him a bad boy • • • • fI
It is not difficult to imagine that these misconceptions
in a four-year-old boy will have a great effect on the adolescent
and young man.
Yet why is this paragraph placed in the story?
•
Except as one
explanatory contributing factor of stephents withdrawal it is not
integral to the story and is linked with no other happening.
A
93
•
smaller but similar incident is his dream of "the face of somebody
who came at night and stood over him and scolded him when he could
not move or get away." (p. 84)
The face is aIl too obviously that
of his nurse Marjory, "terribly near, red and frowning under a
stiff white band." (p. 84)
This dream, evidently meant as a pro-
jection of Stephen's fears into his sleeping fantasy, seems
analytical, as does the careful inclusion of three generations of
disorder and the mention of the little boy's sexual inhibitions.
Although Miss Porter does not overstep the point where art is
forgotten in the interests of scientific fact and theory, she
comes nearer to it in this story than my other chosen authors,
with the
exc~ption
of Peter Taylor.
The straight line of the
disclosure of events reminds one of a case history.
b.
Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale."
Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale,,2 is the most explicitly
Freudian of these stories.
In the childhood events which it des-
cribes one can gather the reason why the spinster narrator is
frightened of sexual experience and guess that these are meant to
be the circunstances which have kept her unmarried.
A tale such
as this aspires to scientific precision as much as to fiction.
Where Miss Porter's story might be a case history, Taylor's might
be the record of what is revealed upon the psychiatrist's couch.
•
2 Peter Taylor, "A Spinster's Tale," A Long Fourth and Other
Stories (New York, 1948). References will be to this edition.
The story was first collected in this edition •
94
•
..... .....
This short story is the only one l am studying which deals
specifically with the problems of puberty and its inclusion in
this chapter perhaps needs some justification; Betsy
and later fourteen, years old.
is thirteen,
In a general discussion of the
author's methods of integrating the sentimental tradition with the
principles of psychology, Taylor's story forms a link between the
tales of Miss Porter and Aiken.
He has used Freudian theory for
the enrichment of his story and the result illustrates the trap
into which an author who attempts this may fall.
He is free of
the pathos of the Porter short story, but he has yet to integrate
his psychological theory with the interests of storytelling as
Aiken has done.
thesis
tales.
Bets~
As the one true adolescent touched upon in this
represents a contrast to the children
Q~
the other
Her problem has aIl the dynamic interactions of forces
which have led the short fiction writer to concentrate upon the
young people of her age group.
She must be her age to have such
events affect her so deeply.
Taylor's most obvious use of psychoanalytic theory is in the
translation of Freud's specific dream-symbols into significant
details of the plot.
Explanations of these symbols can be found
in the tenth lecture of Freud's A
analysis. 3
•
G~neral
Introduction to P,pcho-
AlI are sexual and aIl point to the blighting of the
3 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
Authorized English Translat10n of the Rev~sed Ed1t10n by
Joan Riviere, with Prefaces by- Ernest Jones and G. Stanley
Hall (New York, 1952), pp. 156-177. The copyright date of
the original edition is 1920 •
95
•
young protagonist's efforts to comprehend and come to terms with
the world of men.
It is probably possible to discover a sexual
explanation for each animate and inanimate object mentioned in
this story, but l shall mention only the most obvious ones which
would be recognized by the casual reader as having bearing on the
story.
The male symbols obviate the sexual nature of Betsy's
terrors of the masculine world and comprise the largest group of
such items.
Hands, war, horses, Mr. Speed's hat and cane, and
even the .flames of the fireplace are connected with this world.
The .female is associated with a room or house; thus Betsy's mother
is always remembered in connection with the "warmth," "comfort,"
and softness of her room. (p. 109)
Even the .fact that the house
is on Church street is probably a specifie reference,
fo~
"churches and chapels" are mentioned by Freud as female symbols
in this lecture. 4
Entry into such buildings, or into rooms, is
emblematic of sexual intercourse.
It is not by chance, then, that
the Benton boys enter Betsy's sitting-room and even that she herself enters the men's den.
The incident of Mr. Speed's admission
to the house is the ultimate violation of Betsy's female integrity
by the world of men, and it is described in explicitly erotic
detail.
other symbolism which evolves about this fear of violation
is that of the loft ladder and "the long, red-carpeted stairway"
by which a man (her brother) ascends to her room. (p. 113)
There
is also the use of the metaphor of "playing" with the opposite
•
4 Freud, Introduction, p. 163.
96
••
sex -- the contrived "incident" in her bedroom, the chess game,
and the use of the word "game" in her good-bye to Henry Benton.
Two dreams (aside from the many daydreams) are mentioned in
the story and each makes use of the Freudian theory of displacement, which is expounded in the ninth lecture of the volume
referred to above, as weIl as sex symbols.
The last line of the
story, "It was only the other night that l dreamed l was a little
girl on Chur ch street again and that there was a drunk horse in
our yar.d," (p. 129) is probably meant as a fantasy of wish-fulfillment.
(The narrator regrets ber hast y action and would like to
relive it and correct her error.)
The image of the horse out-of-
control and reckless with drink is that of the male in Betsy's
mind.
The other dream of the enlarged hands, (p. 119) which
confuses her identity, is evidently a vacillating, suppressed
wish for the male penis, for hands too, are named sex symbols
by Freud.
Peter Taylor is indeed anxious to pack aIl aspects of
a possible situation into his tale; he even adds, in Betsy's desire
to be struck by her brother, a wish for the sexual violence of
sadisme
\'Jhen one attempts to look beyond these symbols to the story
and narrative itself, one finds that there is little else of
interest.
There is only the final discovery, relatively unstressed,
of a link of innate cruelty betweenthé opposed masculine and
.'
feminine psyches.
The story is
th~
interaction of these symbols.
The plot action is almost wholly dependent upon the revelation of
97
•
their meanings.
The activity of the reader during the course of
tha story is to diagnose the spinster's "hang-up."
enjoyment of style or theme.
It is not an
It is not an experience of the
"effect" which Poe emphasizes as important to short fiction.
The serious, heavy-handed inclusion of this "psychological"
symbolism here contrasts to its lighter use in such stories as
Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg."
In Anderson's "memory" of a
childhood incident, what could be an overwhelmingly pretentious
symbol of the beginning of doomed lire and the shadow it has cast
over the narrator since he was a child)is given a humorous treatment.
The irony of what is here a symbol of infertility lands
itsèlf weIl to the wry tone of Anderson's tale.
relaxed and open.
The story is
By avoiding the tightly constructed web of
significant details.
Anderson leaves room for speculation on
the nature of "the egg" and its impression upon the mind of a
small boy.
c.
Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
When one speaks of Conrad Aiken's short story as a "psychological" tale, however, it is to discuss a carefully constructed
exegesis of the mind of a mentally ill child.
v-Jhile the story
comes down heavily against the actual process of psychoanalysis,
as the coldness and futility of the "trial" scene attests, an
uncommon attempt has been made to view the- world from the inside
•
of the mind of a boy who is quickly s1ipping into a fantasy world
of snow.
Even if Aiken's continuing interest in psychoanalysis
98
.'
and his admissionthat he has been "profoundly" inrluenced by Freud
and his followers
5
were not proo:f of his knowledge in this area,
the reader would recognize the analytical bias oÏ this tale.
Paul
is one of Aiken's "lost people."
Yet, unlike the psychological mechanics of the tales of 101iss
Porter and Peter Taylor, those of "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" are
excellently combined with the integrity of paul's consciousness.
They never undermine the narrative in the way that Taylor's do.
'-Je are never quite "outsidel! paul's mi'!ldj whan he laughs, for
e:>cample, we are given his observation of the effect of this laugh
on his parents, but we never see him laughing.
Techniques such
as placing external events in parentheses during the classroom
scene and the use of rhetorical questions within Paul's mino which
seem to be in his
OVin
boy's consciousness.
"voice" help to keep the tale l'Ii thin the
The story takes place in four places, in
four scenes from one day -- the schoolroom, the walk hOli1eWard,
the "inquisition" in the living room, and the retreat into the
bedroom -- yet there are so many flashbacks of preceding events
that we become vJell-informed of the progress of Paul' s psychological deterioration during the previous :few days.
Aiken' s st}71e
here approximates the stream-of-consciousness technique of Ulysses,
yet he maintains the sentence structure and the third person,
working within the conventional forros to gain his subjective viewpoint.
•
5 Cited by Hoffman, p. 279. He quotes Aiken's words on this
point from an article in New Verse XI (1934), 13.
99
•
The tale is a small triumph in the utilization of the form,
even more
narrator.
50
when one considers the elaborate diction of the
The fact that thLs being is "outside" Paul allows him
to use an immense vocabulary which describes situations more
exactly, if with less sentimentality, than Katherine Ann Porter's
limited use of \\Tords could do.
When Paul, upset and frightened
at the last, speaks of his trial, we cannot wish such diction
eliminated for the sake of restriction to a child's mind:
a joke! As if he weren't so sure that reassurance was no
longer necessary, and aIl this cross-examination a ridiculous
farce, a grotesque parody! What could they know about it?
These gross intelligences, these humdrum minds so bound to the
usual, the ordinary? Impossible to tell them about it! \~y,
even now, even now, with the proof 50 abundant, so formidable,
so imminent, so appallingly present here in this very room,
could they believe it? (p. 151)
~iJhat
Miss Porter, after aIl, has limited herse1f unfairly.
The narrators
of both pieces are not the children and it is impossible to pretend
that they are.
Because of the precocious phrasing and diction,
some critics have thought that Paul's vocabulary is an indication
that he is a genius, for his age can only be about eight years
old.
But l think that this vocabulary is Aiken's exploitation
of the fact that his narrator is another person.
\'lith the third-
person, after aIl, one cannot wholly fuse subject and object, and
he rec?gnizes and enjoys this facto
Paul seems bright.
He answers
quickly in the classroom and he worries about his observations of
.
'
even such simple things as dog-tracks, but there is little reason
to label him a genius •
100
•
\'Jhy, then, has a child been chosen to illustrate the beauty
and magnitude of a schizophrenie fantasy?
My theory is that
AÏken, like Miss Porter, has chosen a young person because the
forces which control his behavior are less complex in relation to
those of an adult in a comparable situation.
We have seen that
Paul's balance of illusion and reality is a complicated thing,
but it is possible to envision the infinitely greater complexity
of an adult mind.
Paul, for example, has few tasks and worries.
He does not have to worry about the responsibilities of children
or job; polishing his shoes is a small consideration compared to
these.
Even his emotional commitments are less strained, for
he has no problems of puberty or competition.
In aIl ways, Aiken
has simplified the situation as much as possible.
His family is
not complex, with no siblings to create tension, no poverty, and
no truly offensive people.
In the light of larger difficulties,
the tendencies for the person to divide his lire between illusion
and reality can be easily explained, but Aiken has sought the
simplest possible example.
He is thus able to explain the nuances
of such a retreat into fantasy.
The "realitylT of Paul's life seems, at first, quite unfrightening
and congenial -- a
pictur~sque
cobbled-street home, concerned, if
imperceptive parents, a friendly schoolteacher and children.
setting is almost too quiet, too idyllic.
The
The reader soon realizes
that Paul has magnified the distasteful things of this world into a
••
polarity of menace and hate which, by contrast, ebhances his snow
101
•
world.
The remembrance or the rirst morning's awakening indicates
that the rantasy posed no problems ror Paul; he did not dread the
day, or rind threats in his parentIs behavior.
And the snow-dream
was at rirst believed to be real, to have a simple, natural cause.
bd!:~
But even then the snow was fla rortress, a wall.\which he could
retreat into heavenly seclusion." (p. 128)
It is revealed that he
wants "a secret place or his own."
The snow says "peace,"
"remoteness," "cold," and "sleep.u
Like the girl or Jean Starrordls
"The Interior Castle," Paul is retreating into himselr.
l'lere more important things.
Miracles.
"There
Beyond the thoughts or
trees, mere elms • • • • Beyond the thoughts even or his own shoes,
which trod these sidewalks obediently, bearing a burden -above
or elaborate mystery." (pp. 141-142)
~aE
Paul dislikes having
his b09Y and mind known by others, for such erforts reduce him to
an animal state.
It is, arter aIl, his own individuality that he
is maintaining, and the secrecy and privacy of his soule
The homeward walk and the inquisition bring his world or home
and surroundings into rocus.
l have already commented on the
vision of ugliness he rinds on his walk
the "dirty sparroVis
huddled in the bushes, as dull in color as dead fruit left in
leafless trees," and the "little delta of filth" in a drain.
Yet
Aiken again is carerul not to luake this ugliness too overwhelming.
This vision is opposed by some beauty -- the egg-shaped stones, for
example,-- and objects simply noted in passing in the continuing
•
observations or Paul's mind -- "The green hydrant, with a little
green-painted chain attached ta the brass screw cap."
102
•
The "inquisition," however, leaves no doubt as to what Paul is
,
rejecting. The doctor's "false amiability" and the "hostile
presences" which attempt to probe his mind are repelling.
They
are "bound to the usual, the ordinaryi" unable to follow his
flight into a lovely dream.
So Paul, like Harry, deliberately slips away into another
world.
We have seen in the chapter on the artist and the chi Id
that this illusion embodies the extremities of aIl Paul knows,
of love, oÎ space, oÎ beauty, and oÎ life.
It is carefully
chosen to contrast to the dull and meaningless existence he now
pictures his life to be.
It is possible to analyze this short
story in strictly psychiatrie terms, as has been do ne by William
M. Jones, who discusses even Deirdre's freckles in his consideration of Paul's "schizophrenie" withdrawal into a "catatonie
trance."
6
Leo Hamalian carries the study into a specifically
Freudian area and insists on finding here an
Oe~ipal
situation
supported by lists oÎ Freudian male and female sex symbols. 7
l think, in the interests oÎ purely literary criticism, that
such explication is unnecessary, but it is interesting to know
that Aiken has so constructed his story that this can be done.
6 william M. Jones, "Aiken's 'Silent Snow,
The Explicator, XVIII (1960), 34.
•
Secret Snow,'"
7 Leo Hamalian, "Aiken's 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow,'"
The Explicator, VII (1948), 17.
103
•
d.
Summary
It would seem that Aiken begins with a scientific interest in
schizophrenia and manages to evolve a very successful short story.
He avoids Taylor's submersion in the facts of a psychosis such as
this.
Miss Porter, on the other hand, has begun in the opposite
fashion -- with a romantic, even pathetic tale -- and has cluttered
it up with skillfully placed, yet extraneous material.
Her short
story is not nearly so successful, for the reader is ever aware of
"clues" which are meant to lead him to the song of hate at the
story's end.
Her contriving, like that of Taylor, has produced
an unreal child.
The strangeness of these three short stories comes, however,
not from their methods of composition, but from the fact that
psychiatric study has been used at aIl.
One can probably say
in the cases of Aiken and Porter that such investigation has
helped the writers to gain their desired "effect," yet why have
they been used?
They postulate a reading public able to "catch"
the clues which have been so carefully placed, and thus in some
way limit their audience to those readers with sorne knowledge of
psychology.
Such attempts go beyond a consideration of the
pê.rticular person to a&l exploration of the universal characteristics of rejection, inhibition, and withdrawal.
They put the
child, as a young person, in a realistic perspective, but perhaps
they rob him of those characteristics which have made him a
•
fascination for centuries •
104
•
Part C.
Conclusion.
Maxwell Geismar has remarked upon the facts that "the New
Yorker school of fiction" al ways returns to "That lost world of
childhood • • • • that pre-Edenite community of yearned-for bliss,
where knowledge is again the serpent of aIl evil."l
He considers
that such writers remain in "the nursery of life and art."
2
In
his quarrel with Salinger in particular and "the New Yorker school"
in general, he laments this facto
sary;to do so.
l am not sure that it is neces-
If a vision such as this is possible to work into
excellent fiction, and this thesis is an attempt to prove that it
is, it is unfair to criticize the frequency of its occurrence.
In Chapter VIII l have emphasized the ihterest in the child as
the simplest embodiment of universal human behavior.
Paul's enjoy-
ment of a seclusive beauty and an exciting, progressive fear, for
example, is part of a typical, studied pattern of withdrawal.
Because the makeup of his characted.is relatively simple, the
consequences of events which occur can be analyzed.
This is, l
suggest, a quite different object from that of the fïrst story l
have considered, Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory."
In Capote's
focus on the particular nostalgie memory there is almost an
opposite concern with the chilcL
There is aIl the difference between
a highly subjective interest in the self' and a technical search for
1 Maxwell Geismar, . American Moderns: From Rebellion to
Conformity (London, 1958), p. 209.
•
2 Geismar, p. 209 •
105
•
classic patterns or behavior.
The two ends or the continuum or
interest in the child may meet: at just what point does selrexamination come upon the basic rorces or emotions, motivation,
and modes or thought?
It is ror this reason one can discuss the
memories or Capote as a sentimentally reminiscent recollection
and as a search ror a native artist-child.
For the most part,
however, the two are unreconciled.
l think it is necessary to say that the short story writers
of this century, -in concentrating upon the child, are continuing
a mode of approach which is essentially "roroantic."
The child,
who was originally considered good because he was near ideal
nature, has retained this innate value although his buttressing,
pastoral tradition has been almost completely destroyed.
(It
lingers still in Capote and in some of the better-known writers
of the century l am not considering in detail, such as Faulkner
and Hemingway.)
The child's closeness to the natural forces
derived from the idyllic setting such as Wordsworth's and the
sensible vlÎsdom of his ideas have continued to constitute his
image in our century.
It is p:r.obably necessary, at some point, ror each person to
decicle I::for" this natural impulse or "ror" the educated man.
Although our century tends to scofr at the terms "original sin"
and lforiginal goodness," it seems that the concepts represented,
although freed from specifically Christian evil, have simply been
•
transformed into a more subtle forme
The child of the romantic
tradition of our century remains allied with the forces dI., good.
./
106
•
To doubt his wisdom is comparable to slandering the worth or motherhood.
Perhaps his chier value ror the authors of these representa-
tive short stories is his immense sensitivity.
/
In any very young
being there is a spareness, almost a transparency.
The various
aspects or his body and his behavior cannot help but be revealed.
His reactions are pure.
Even the child or rive or seven years
retains some or this initial rascination.
For the writer seeKing
the truth or love, or creation or any other abstraction the perceptions or such a being cannot help but be alluring.
The story
can end in pathos or triumph, but the apprehensions of the child
provide the philosophie center or its values.
Perhaps this child-image is inevitable in a complex and urban
society
which has somehow "gone wrong."
Dissatisfaction with its
many defects leads to the emulation of those values not found there.
Complexity, bustle, and corruption in the midst or stagnation have
their opposite in the image (ir not the actuality) or the country
and of the child.
As long as an elaborate, imperrect culture exists,
the "romantic" tradition will oppose it and the child will remain
the critic and saviour.
His initiation into the necessary problems
of adulthood will be regretted.
Mary Poppins, the Peter Pan of our
century, will still be viewed; TOlkien, Joan Walsh Anglund, and
.
/
sa~nt-Exupery
,s
Le Petit Prince will still be read.
l have stressed the continuation or the romantic tradition in
part A of my thesis.
In attempting to demonstrate the "why" of the
rascination or the child l have undoubtedly ommitted facets which
/
107
•
might be oI interest, (the continuation of the pastoral tradition
represented by Faulkner's "The Bear" and the sympathetic link
between children and elderly people could comprise chapters in
themselves).
For aIl these writers the image of the child is a
positive, sensitivE int.iicator of the "right" way in a "wrong"
world.
If he does wrong, as Miss porter's Stephen does, it is not
his fault -- he has not been taught carefully enough.
treated sympathetically.
He is always
y
If the adult world causes his destruction,
he becomes an object of pity.
Such stories as Miss Stafford's and
Miss Porter's always contain a kernel of irony, for something
/
innocent and pure is in the process of being destroyed.
This sentimentality has received a boost, rather than an opposition, from scientific interest such as that 1 have described in
Part B of my thesis.
As l have stated in the introductory chapter
for that section, the confrontation of the two has involved a
"grafting on" of principles of psychology to traditional material.
This is obviously not a recent development -- Aiken's story was
lvritten before any of the others studied in my thesis -- but it is
one that has influenced many of the writers to some degree.
stress upon childhood
e}~erience
The
by recent psychologists has given
new impetus to the inherited pattern, Ior it has validated the concern with childhood.
A more organic view, such as that originally
underlined by Wordsworth's The prelude, has become the usual matter
of the short stories l have analyzed here.
Unlike Paul Dombey, the
blighted children do not simply fade pathetically and cease to existe
108
•
If they do die it is because some major confrontation with life
has taken place.
Harry, in Flannery O'Connor's short story, for
example, chooses to leave what has been revealed as an inferior
and debilitating place, the "apartment."
The personalities of
those who live, such as Paul and Hannah, are twisted in ways which
cannot fail to affect their future development.
This developmental
view has always been a part of American tradition -- Hemingway's
In Our Time is probably the best-known such work -- but it has
tended to stress the adolescent boy.
In utilizing the very young
child in a similar context, the short story writers studied in
this thesis are following the tradition to its genesis.
In doing
so, they have lost the original brashness and ruggedness of the
Huck Finn tradition.
But they have found the same integrity.
There is never mistrust of the values they represent, or of the
nature of their comment upon the society within which the y existe
109
•
Bibliography
Aiken, Conrad.
Among the Lost People.
New York, 1934.
Appel, Alfred Jr. A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora
Welty. Baton Rouge, 1965.
Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James.
Pennsylvania, 1954.
Philadelphia,
Blake, William. Selected Poems of William Blake, ed.
F.W. Bateson. London, 1961.
Boas, George.
The Cult of Childhood.
London, 1966.
Bradbury, John M. Renaissance in the South.
North Carolina, 1963.
Chapel Hill,
Brooks, Van Wyck.
New York, 1920.
Burnett, Whit, ed.
The Ordeal of Mark Twain.
Time to Be Young.
New York, 1945.
Capote, Truman.
Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and
~T~h~r~e~e~S~h~o~r~t~S~t~o~r~i~e~s.
Toronto, 1966.
The Grass Harp. New York, 1951 •
. --.
Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York, 1948.
Coveney, Peter. The Image of Childhood; The Individual and
Society: a Study of the Theme in English Literature.
Revised Edition with an Introduction by F. R. Leavis.
Harmondsworth, 1967.
Davis, Clyde Brown, ed.
The Eyes of Boyhood. Philadelphia, 1953.
Detweiler, Robert. "The Curse of Christ in Flannery O'Connor's
Fiction," Comparative Literature Studies, III (1966), 235-245.
Dickens, Charles.
Edel, Leon.
Dombey and Son.
London, 1948.
The Psychological Novel 1900-1950.
Philadelphia, 1955.
Emerson, Ralph l'laldo. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Stephen E. Whicher. Boston, 1957.
Faulkner, William. The Portable Faulkner, ed.
New York, 1954 •
•
Malcolm Cowley.
110
•
Fiedler, Leslie. An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and
POlitics. Boston, 1948.
Freud, Anna.
1965.
Normality and Pathology in Chi1dhood.
New York,
Freud, Sigmund, M.D., LL.D. A General Introduction to
Psychoana1ysis. Authorized English Translation of the
Revised Edition by Joan Riviere with Prefaces by Ernest
Jones and G. Stanley Hall. New York, 1952.
Three Contributions to a Theory of Sexe
transe A. A. Brill. Third Revised Edition. New York
and waShington, 1918.
Geismar, Maxwell. American Moderns: From Rebellion to
Conformity. London, 1958.
Goldberg, Gerald Jay, ed.
Cliffs, N. J., 1965.
The Fate of Innocence.
Englewood
Green, Graham. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays.
London, 1951:
Grossman, Ann. "Silent Snow, Secret Snow: The Child as
Artist," Studies in Short Fiction, I (1964), 123-128.
Grunwald, Henry Anatole, ed. Salinger: A Critical and
Personal Portrait. New York, 1962.
Hamalian, Leo. "Aiken's 'Silent Snow,
The Explicator, VII (1948), 17.
Secret Snow,'"
Hart, Jane. "Strange Barth, the Stories of Flannery O'Connor/'
The Georgia Review, XII (1958), 215-222.
Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the contemporary
American Novel. princeton, N. J., 1961.
Heiney, Donald.
Recent American Literature.
Woodbury, N.J., 1958.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Co1umn and the First Forty-Nine
stories. New York, 1938.
Hoffman, Frederick J. Conrad Aiken. New York, 1962.
Freudianism and the Literary Mind.
Second Edition. ADn Arbor, MiChigan, 1964.
•
Hyman, S. E.
Flannery O'Connor.
Minneapolis, Miss., 1966 •
III
•
James, Henry.
What Maisie Knew.
York, 1908.
N~7
Jones, William M. "Aiken's 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow,'"
The Explicator, XVIII (1960), 34.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
New York, 1964.
Kranidas, Thomas. "Point of View in Salinger's 'Teddy,'"
Studies in Short Fiction, II (1964), 88-91.
Lardner, Ring. The Ring Lardner Reader, ed.
New York, 1963.
Laser, Marvin, and Norman Fruman, eds.
Salinger. New York, 1963.
Maxwell Geismar.
Studies in J. D.
Levine, Paul. "Truman Capote: The Revelation oÏ the Broken
Image," The Virginia, Quarterly Review, XXXIV (1958),
600-617.
Lewis, R. W. B.
The American Adam.
Chicago, 1955.
McCullers, Carson. "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," Prize Stories
1943: The O. Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and HansÏord
Martin. Garden City, New York, 1943.
Malin, Irving.
New American Gothie.
Carbondale, 1962.
Martin, Jay. Conrad Aiken, A LiÏe oÏ His Art.
New Jersey, 1962.
Princeton,
i.uic.\OI
Moravia, Alberto. "Two American Writers,"
Quarterly, LXVIII (1960), 473-481.
The Sewanee
~
Nance, William L., S. M. Katherine Ann Porter and The Art oÏ
Rejection. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1964.
O'Connor, Flannery. "The Fiction writer and His Country,"
The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Granville Hicks.
New York, 1957, pp. 157-164.
Three ~Flannery O'Connor. New York, 1964.
Peden, William. The American Short Story: Front Line in The
National Defense of Literature. Boston, 1964.
Peterson, Houston,
•
The Melody of Chaos.
New York, 1931 •
112
•
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allen Poe.
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Edward H. Davidsen.
Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
Porter, Katherine Ann.
New York, 1944.
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories.
Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories.
Cleveland, Ohio, 1960.
Salinger, J. D.
Nine Stories. New York, 1964.
"Hapworth 16, 1924," The New Yorker XLI
(June 19, 1965), 32-113.
Smith, J. Oates. "Ritual and Violence in Flannery O'Connor,"
Thought, XLI (1967), 545-560.
Snow, Ollye Tine. "The Functional Gothie of Flannery O'Connor,"
The Southwest Review, L (1965), 286-299.
Stafford, Jean. Bad Characters. London, 1964.
"The Shorn Lamb," Prize Stories 1954: The O.
Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin.
Garden City, N. Y., 1954.
Stone, Albert, Jr. The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark
Twain's Imagination. New Haven, 1961.
Taylor, Peter.
A Long Fourth and Other Stories.
New York, 1948.
Thomas, Dylan.
Quite Early One Morning. New York, 1954.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
New York, 1940.
Thurston, Jarvis A., ed.
Chicago, 1955.
Trilling, Lionel.
Boston, 1955.
Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture.
Van Ghent, Dorothey.
New York, 1953.
Walsh, William.
.-,.
Reading Modern Short Stories.
The English Novel: Form and Function.
The Use of the Imagination.
Harmondsworth. 1966.
113
Warren, Robert Penn.
Welty, Eudora.
Selected Essays.
New York, 1951.
A Curtain of Green. Garden City, N. Y., 1941.
three Papers ~ Fiction. Northampton, Mass., 1962.
Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth's Poetical Works, ed. Thomas
Hutchison. A New Edition, revised by Ernest de Selincourt.
London, 1904 •
•